Mail<->News Gateways

[Felix E. Klee]

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 17:36:22 +0200 Felix E. Klee wrote:
> Any ideas?

FYI: We decided to use the mailpost and news2mail facilities in INN.
They mostly seem to work fine.  However, there are a couple of quirks,
some of which we solved already:

1. To get sendmail to continue before "mailpost -c ..." is finished,
   stdout and stderr have to be redirected.  An example of an alias:

       test: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post test", "|/bin/bash -c '/usr/lib/news/bin/mailpost -c 10 -b /tmp ffii.test >&/dev/null'"

2. news2mail tells sendmail to queue messages (to avoid DOS attacks, but
   we're not that concerned about this issue).  To solve the problem,
   line 102 in news2mail has to be changed.

3. After a message is forwarded from a NG to a ML via news2mail,
   postnews kicks in and tries to resend it to the NG.  The result is an
   email to the news server with a subject such as

       inews failed: inews: cannot send article to server: 441 435
       Duplicate: Illegal seek inews: article not posted

   Hacking the postnews script to prevent sending emails in such cases
   would solve the problem.  But maybe there is a nicer solution?

4. Crossposts to NGs are not properly handled by news2mail.  The problem
   is that a dot is used as a separator in the "To:" field of the
   mails to the mailing lists.  An example:

       Newsgroups: foo, bar

   would get translated into

       To: foo at example.org.bar@example.org

   This seems to be a definite bug that can probably be fixed quickly by
   someone who speaks Perl.  We'll investigate that tomorrow.

5. Postings to a NG should be forwarded to the corresponding ML, no
   matter if the user is subscribed or not.  We haven't yet investigated
   this problem at all and, thus, would appreciate any suggestion.
   We're running Mailman to host the lists, BTW.

Felix