-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- L. McCarthy <lmccarth@ducie.cs.umass.edu> wrote:

Is the AMS software (or some similar system) available as freeware or shareware somewhere ? I'm considering the possibilities for anonymized subscription to newsgroups through a mechanism like this.

AMS is pretty strongly tied to AFS (now known as part of DCE) and is geared towards sites with users in the thousands. It's probably not what you want, even if it were available (CMU is in the process of phasing it out, since their user base usage has exceeded the design limitations of AMS).

Come to think of it, many newsgroups are gatewayed to related mailing lists for readers on BBSes and such; I need to search a bit for the software used to do this.

Take a look at newsgate, available somewhere on ftp.uu.net. All you have to do is set up a pseudo-site in your news server's newsfeeds file and send the messages through news2mail.

I'm curious how such systems deal with cancellation messages; presumably they would simply have to drop them. This would partially eliminate the threat of spam-of-cancels attacks I mentioned earlier.

It totally depends upon the configuration of the gateway and the format of the message. If your gateway passes Control: headers, then cancels will be forwarded to the user and perhaps even be effective if they have another mail-to-news gateway up (that allows Control: headers). Even more so for cancels of the "Subject: cmsg cancel" format, since everything passes Subject: headers. - -- Todd Masco | It's difficult to be loud about keeping your enumerated cactus@hks.net | rights when you're busy exercising your unenumerated ones. cactus@bb.com | http://www.hks.net/~cactus/cactus.html - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBLuyoqSoZzwIn1bdtAQH4gQGAqbROjwEHW6VVYwawXtzeTitdkpWXoytC UNEMT8FPQ49MqbwWnWMJfZDY1CGZoRpU =Yrr9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----