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Re: mail/news unification

2003-02-25 09:22:21

Charles Lindsey <chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> 
schrieb/wrote:
In <10214959861(_dot_)20030222130448(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com> Dave Crocker 
<dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com> writes:
Yes, the superficial similarities are apparent, but there are real serious
differences behind the scenes. You see this when you try to gateway
between a newsgroup and a mailing list. The simple cases work fine, but
just think what happens if an article is submitted to two mailing lists,
or is posted to several newsgroups with more than one of them gatewayed to
a mailing list. Life suddenly starts to get extremely complicated for the
poor implementor(s).

Unfortunatly, noone seems to be interested in a solution. The
development of news and mail standards is done by different people.

Well, there are several problems:

On the mail side:

* Identifying what lists a message has been sent to (if you get a copy
  through another list or directly). Identifying which addresses are
  list addresses and which are ``personal'' or ``group'' addresses.
  Possible solution: List-To (and List-Followup-To) containing List-IDs.

* Retrieving metadata of a list you are not subscribed to (i.e. how to
  post, subscribe, where to find an archive, etc.)
  Possible solutions: URN lookup mechanism (does not work offline),
  including metadata in headers of all messages not sent through the
  list (possible spoofing problems).

* Identifying lists that actually are gatewayed newsgroups.
  Possible solution: URI (news:alt.foo.bar or nntp://news.example.com/
  example.foo.bar) as the List-ID.

On the news side:

* Identifying newsgroups that actually are gatewayed mailing lists.
  Possible solution: including the info in all messages posted (only
  moderated groups with a submission address that eventually forwards to
  the mailing list post address).

And, of course, the format differences.

Claus
-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de/

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