There are two E-mail <-> NetNews gateway packages in wide use. I wrote
the first one. I'm not very proud of it; its age is showing, and it
needs a rewrite. It is in production use for between 100 and 200
mailing lists gatewayed at ucbvax.berkeley.edu, and a few other places.
The other one was written by Rich Salz of BBN.
NNTP (RFC977) is explicitly 7 bit ASCII, just like SMTP (RFC821). That
was my doing, for good or ill. UUCP itself can handle arbitrary bags
of bits without modification - what you worry about is the processing
software at each stopover (e.g. rmail, rnews). Geoff Collyer claims
that C News will handle arbitrary bags of bits, but C news is not now,
nor will it ever be the entire network - so why tempt fate by sending
unencoded bits? Conservative in what you send and all that...
There is a V2 NNTP spec in the works by an IETF WG, and a mailing list
to match. You can find it in the usual way for IETF stuff, charter &
all. At present, that is where NetNews stuff is being discussed. I'm
told by the chairman that there will be a meeting in San Diego.
Henry Spencer (1/2 of the C news team) is threatening to write a
son-of-RFC1036, but there are a variety of realities that I think he
will ignore in the name of some mythical architectural purity or
minimalism, so his stuff will probably not see RFC status without some
other paws on the document.
I tried (really!) to get Internet mailing list moderators to produce
undigestified streams for the NetNews gateway about four years ago. I
succeeded with one or two. Stubborn people set in their ways (grump).
Fortunately, the more NetNews spreads to be The Conferencing System Of
The Internet, the more obvious (Digest == Bad) will be. Unfortunately,
this is a slow process.
If you do an undigestifier, that's OK, but the problem will always be
the digestifiers. They usually throw away valuable information (like
Message-ID, References, etc). This makes useful undigestifying hard to
do (and the digest creators will moan at us for asking them to keep
that stuff with the same lame refrain that we get from the BITNET
LISTSERV people: "the UA's are too stupid to hide those ugly headers
from the users! We gotta strip 'em in the transport!"). It's hard to win.
I often want to hit implementors (E-mail and NetNews) over the head
with Tom Malone's early work on the Information Lens (see CACM, May '87)
as a vision of What Could Be If We Tried. There's also some interesting
stuff to be found under the rubric of "Computer Supported Cooperative
Work (CSCW)". But then, I've always been a crazy dreamer when it came
to NetNews.
Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair(_at_)apple(_dot_)com