[ntp:questions] forwarding

David Woolley david at djwhome.demon.co.uk
Wed Mar 16 22:13:13 UTC 2005


In article <d17vrq$2kdr$6 at hedeland.org>,
per at hedeland.org (Per Hedeland) wrote:
> In article <mailman.18.1110671158.576.questions at lists.ntp.isc.org> Brad
> Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:

>               For as long as I can remember, there has been "stupid"
> newbie and/or off-topic questions posted directly to the newgroup, and I

I think that any increase has much more to do with the inclusion of
NTP and related protocols into products that are sold into a much more
black box market (most of the Windows and most of the Red Hat market is
like that, in particular, even most business users of Windows fall in that
category).  The increasing domestic use of always on connections also
means the NTP capabilities of those products are more likely to be used.

>          meta-discussions about a newsgroup's form and/or charter are
> quite relevant (within limits of course), 

Agreed

> gateways from a single mailing list into different newsgroups. In these
> cases, gatewaying without Message-ID munging typically means that only
> the "first" gatewaying of the message is successful, the others will be
> rejected 

In my experience, cross-posting on mailing lists is even more of
a negative quality indicator than on USENET.  On mailing lists there
is a very high likelihood that anyone group replying to the item
will be blocked by the subscription only nature of most mailing lists,
forced on them by the spammers.  On USENET, there are cases where 
cross-posting is legitimate, but it is also a characteristic of free
consultancy requests.  (Cross-mailing tends to be associated with
attempts to publish rather than to request, so is slightly different.)

In any case, the gateway is already breaking cross-posting as it 
cannot reflect the Newsgroups header into the mail in a way that
is reversible when using an ordinary MUA.  The only way of doing
this is by the gateway re-associating the message.  (In some
ways we are back to the bad old days of FIDONet gateways here, where
stateless gateways regularly broke USENET threading on the more 
popularist groups.)

The only way of maintaining proper USENET compliance is to treat the
mail side message IDs as local references, and implement full threading
newsreader capability in the gateway.

> >	However, what does not happen in Mailman 2.1.5 is the *removal* 
> >of all previous examples of the prefix which may have been put in the 
> >subject line by MUAs.

> Sorry, but this is nonsensical. Mailman inserts the string on messages

I also found that this made no sense when I first saw it; of course
it is the gateway that is responsible for this corruption of the header.




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