Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:
Russ Allbery wrote:
To take an example, if someone posts to a local Stanford newsgroup and
also cc's postmaster(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu, that message will show up at a
mail
to news gateway, since we gate all mail to postmaster into a newsgroup.
And that gateway can't trust the Newsgroups header in the message; it
will do completely the wrong thing.
I don't see the problem; if the message hits an injector first and the
gateway also tries to inject to the specified stanford.foo or whatever
newsgroup as well as the gated postmaster group, surely the message-id
will already be there and there won't be a duplicate or other problem.
You're missing a couple of things.
First, the message has already been posted to the group the original
poster was trying to post it to before it ever goes through the mail to
news gateway. So if the gateway then can't post becuase of a duplicate
message ID, the message never shows up in the postmaster group; in effect,
the cc to postmaster doesn't work and the message is, from the perspective
of people reading through that gateway, lost. That's obviously bad.
Second, even if you could work around that, the newsgroups for gatewayed
role address mail are not accessible to normal Stanford users for obvious
reasons, which means that they also don't allow crossposting with regular
Stanford groups. So even if you could patch the message up to crosspost,
that doesn't work.
There have to be two messages posted, to two separate groups, and the mail
to news gateway has to ignore the Newsgroups header in the mailed copy
that it receives. There's no other way to make this work.
And if by quirk the mailed copy hits the gateway before the posted copy
is injected, the same applies. So what's the problem?
We actually want to see the message in both groups. :)
Is the postmaster gateway mangling message-ids or something?
Of course. It has to. In fact, most non-trivial mail to news gateways
have to rewrite message IDs. It's a requirement for any gateway of a
mailing list that might be gatewayed by multiple people independently.
As for the other issue of IMAP servers re-serving news messages via IMAP,
I think we've pretty much talked around this issue. I continue to believe
that there are points in the IMAP server code where it knows it's dealing
with news articles and *could* do a conversion, for pretty much any IMAP
server out there, although there may be some rare cases where it's tricky
to find that spot. I also believe that this is rather annoying to have to
do.
I agree that if an existing IMAP gateway for news messages is presented
with messages with UTF-8 headers, it's not going to work correctly, and
that in some circumstances keeping such messages away from an IMAP gateway
that's not yet been modified may be tricky.
The rest I think is just disagreements of opinion over what level of
backward compatibility is mandatory versus desireable, and since I'm not
really arguing for solution (A) anyway, just trying to summarize it well
enough that people can evaluate it, I think I'll leave it at that. I
don't think at this point we're adding new information that would be of
use to people who haven't yet made up their mind.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>