mailpost uses inews: Bad?

[Russ Allbery]

Felix E Klee <felix.klee at inka.de> writes:

> I read several times that using inews in news2mail gateways is bad.  The
> rationale is that inews does some checks that are unnecessary or even
> counterproductive, given that the gatewaying software is written
> correctly.  Text from the inews man page explaining such a check:

>      If the article does not meet these checks (for example, too much
>      quoting of old articles, or posting to non-existent newsgroups)
>      then the article is rejected.

> Now I wonder why INN's mailpost *does* use inews.  Is it safe to replace
> it with rnews (which I tried, BTW, and it worked fine, AFAICS)?

inews doesn't do nearly as many checks as it used to, so this concern is
somewhat out of date for INN's inews at least.  It does, however, still
sometimes do a few checks that one might not like.  (It also does checks
that one may *want*, like making sure that control messages don't sneak
through the gateway.)

I've checked in a new manual page that's significantly updated and fleshed
out and should provide more detail about just what inews does.

> Also: Could someone provide me with a message that contains too much
> quoting of old articles so that inews rejects it?  I failed assembling
> such a thing myself and I'd like to have this as a test case.

You have to set checkincludedtext to true in inn.conf; it's not the
default.  If it's set, just try posting an article longer than 40 lines
with more quoted text than original text.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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