ned freed <ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com> writes:
I have to say I find the recent claim that "in the reverse direction
News->Email, such general-purpose gateways just Do Not Exist" to be
pretty amazing, if for no other reason that I have years of direct
personal experience with such gateways.
I don't know what the phrase "general-purpose" is intended to mean, but
there are a very large number of news->mail gateways in operation today.
I run one here at Stanford for any of our local groups that anyone wishes
gated to a mailing list, so that could be described as general-purpose. I
believe comp.lang.python is gated back to e-mail, as are multiple
newsgroups in the gnu.* hierarchy. And those are just the ones that occur
to me off-hand.
The functionality is even built-in to one mailing list manager (Mailman),
and is a common enough request that software to do this comes with INN.
Alternatively, if the group decides it's not interested in the IESG
imprimatur, I'd suggest that the group consider reforming outside the
aegis of the IETF.
That's also an option, of course.
As an implementor, I'm pretty uninterested in any "standardization" effort
for Usenet that doesn't take place under the imprimatur of the IETF. If
no coherent IETF working group can be formed, I think we'd still be better
off continuing on the way that we have for the past decade than to try to
follow a process that doesn't have the sorts of checks that the IETF
process has. I think the structure adds something valuable.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>