UUDecoding on the FLy?

William White bwhite at frognet.net
Sat Jun 26 18:09:46 UTC 2004


ozzy at pixelfodder.com wrote:
> Hi Guys & Gals,
> 
> I looked the archives and haven't found anything on this. I've got a 
> private newsfeed coming in that has multipart mime-encoded data which is 
> the only thing i'm interested in, is there a way I can setup INN to 
> automatically decode that data to the filesystem?

I have some experience in decoding a newsfeed, and have been doing so 
for some time now (I don't believe it's appropriate for me to promote or 
mention company names here).  Or at least I was doing this; now I mostly 
run a vanilla news server for my ISP.  INN is quite suitable as a 
feeder, and I highly recommend it.

If you're looking to handle single-article posts in a single newsgroup 
and don't care about bogus yENC and weird multipart MIME articles (most 
of which are spam anyway), it's relatively easy.  If this is a personal 
interest project, you're best using an existing code base.  Give serious 
thought to the offline approach Bill Davidsen mentions.

If on the other hand you want to handle multi-article posts, two-level 
multi-article posts (i.e., part X/Y of part W/Z), multipart archive 
files (RAR and ACE), for all or nearly all newsgroups in a full feed, 
it's rather difficult.  You will need good hardware, good programmers, 
attention to detail, and at least one maintenance coder whose sole job 
is to troll newsgroups looking for new subject line patterns so that 
two-level (and the occasional three-level) multipart files are 
reassembled correctly.

If your desire is to make money at this, you'd best have a good lawyer 
(and more time, startup capital, and/or luck than I ever did).   If you 
plan on taking a full feed, I highly recommend an MD5- or SHA1-based 
checksum database for blacklist purposes, it'll keep you in good graces 
with the FBI.  We offer ours (MD5) to anyone who wants it; if you're 
going to go this route and want a copy to prepopulate yours, just ask.

If you want more information please contact me privately.


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