You have a good summary of what's going on. Personally I've found it useful to create a filter for my cypherpunks mail to send posts from people whom I respect more into a seperate folder such that the signal-to-noise ratio in that folder is higher. When I have more time I read the folder with the lower signal-to-noise ratio, but I often do not have those resources. I don't really have to deal with bad posts because I don't see most of them unless I have some extra time on my hands... Others interested in rational discussion and debate and actual-doing-things might find this a useful technique. Ditto. Actually I gateway c'punks straight into a local 'mail.cypherpunks' group, with the hack script below (there might be an easier way, but I had the code around anyway). First, I created a user called 'cypher', then gave it this .forward: suilven% cd ~cypher suilven% cat .forward "|mail2news mail.cypherpunks cypherpunks@toad.com" Since I'm running the smrsh security wrappers, mail2news has to be in the special smrsh directory, /usr/adm/sm.bin. mail2news: #!/usr/contrib/bin/taintperl # # mail2news - Incredibly simple program to take a mail message from # stdin and insert it into a moderated newsgroup so you can # read mailing list messages via news instead of mail. # # Usage: mail2news <newsgroup> <reply-gateway> # # Author: Stephen Hebditch <steveh@orbital.demon.co.uk> # # Operation: # 1. Create a new local group (e.g. orbital.lists.uri) with moderated # status to contain the local messages. # 2. Make sure the newsgroup isn't going to propagate outside your # system. # 3. Modify mailpaths (C News) or moderators (INN) so that your local # replies get sent back to the mailing list. # 4. Use a mail filter program (such as comes with elm) to divert # messages arriving from the list to this program instead. # # Add local config info here # Make secure (from 'perl' man page) $ENV{'PATH'} = '/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin'; $ENV{'IFS'} = '' if $ENV{'IFS'} ne ''; $path = $ENV{'PATH'}; # Not tainted $domain = "suilven.an-teallach.com"; $rnews = "/bin/rnews"; $update = "/usr/local/bin/op updatetrn"; $user = "news"; # If badly installed, news will get the replies $newsgroup = $ARGV[0]; if (!$newsgroup) { die ("No newsgroup name supplied\n"); } $replyaddr = $ARGV[1]; if (!$replyaddr) { $replyaddr = $user; } $body = 0; $kill = 0; $subject = 0; open (NEWS, "|$rnews") || die ("Can't run $rnews: $!\n"); print (NEWS "Newsgroups: $newsgroup\nPath: $domain!not-for-mail\n"); print (NEWS "Followup-To: poster\nReply-To: $replyaddr\n"); while (<STDIN>) { chop; if (!$body) { if (/^Subject:\s+(.*)$/io) { if ($1 ne "") { $subject++; print (NEWS "$_\n"); } } # Add here any headers you wish to kill elsif (/^(Received|Return-Path|X400-Received|Newsgroups|Path|To|Reply-To):/io) { $kill++; } elsif (/^From\s.*$/io) { } elsif ((/^\s.*$/io) && ($kill)) { } elsif ($_ eq "") { $body++; if (!$subject) { print (NEWS "Subject: <no subject>\n") } print (NEWS "Approved: news@$domain\n\n"); } else { $kill = 0; print (NEWS "$_\n"); } } else { print (NEWS "$_\n"); } } close (NEWS); system($update); exit (0);