mailpost uses inews: Bad?

Felix E. Klee felix.klee at inka.de
Tue Dec 21 00:02:58 UTC 2004


At Sun, 19 Dec 2004 19:28:31 -0800,
Russ Allbery wrote:
> > 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 somewhat out of date for INN's inews at least.  

I see.

However, some time ago, I changed mailpost to use rnews, and this works
fine.

> 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.)

The latter point is indeed of interest.  I wonder whether it is
definitely possible to manipulate the server by gating messages via
rnews in mailpost, or whether this is only an issue in case of security
flaws.  I may check that once I find the time.

> 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.

Thanks very much.

> 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.

That's good to know.

Felix

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