Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 22:55 EDT From: "E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU> Well, Lance Cottrell would appear to be a good person to ask on this matter, but...

I just set up a recipe for using mail2news gateways like this:

:0 c | formail -I "Newsgroups: alt.cypherpunks,misc.misc" | \ sendmail mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu mail2news@utopia.hacktic.nl

Any objections?

given that mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu gets one of its USENET feeds via cyberpass.net, it would appear to be unnecessary if this recipe is in use. However, I do have one problem with this recipe: lack of loop prevention if a news2mail gateway is going in the other direction. All the mailing-list hosts are supposed to check for duplicates before forwarding anything, so this shouldn't do anything worse than have a few extra copies of each post get discarded, loading the network and the hosts a bit more. But posting the list to a widely-distributed newsgroup seems wrong for noise (both to the list itself and to posters) and delay reasons. (I've crossposted this message to the remailer-operators mailing list to make sure it gets to the operators of the gateways in question.) In regards to your later query about whether people want their postings going to Usenet, might I suggest that this be individual to the given distributed mailing list? In other words, since the recipe is logically going to have to not forward to a gateway messages from other mailing lists (since it's not a good idea to have multiple copies of the same message arriving at the gateway if it can be helped; better to filter it out beforehand), It doesn't seem an especially bad idea, since it some of the mailing lists can forward and the others cannot. (One could even determine this behavior on application of the proper X-header, although I never trust various mailing systems to forward such intact.) The same could also be done with gatewaying _from_ Usenet - if the news2mail gateway feeds to whatever individual lists sign up to it and they _don't_ forward such messages to others, people can decide whether or not to receive Usenet postings on alt.cypherpunks.* by which list they subscribe to. -Allen P.S. A thank you to Reece for setting up a gateway; I had looked at the program and did _not_ much like the idea of having to maintain it on my limited knowledge of C/C++ and mailing software. The code currently running is a perl script that turns typical email messages into something INN is happy with. It is probably possible to get your message rejected by INN if you put obsolete or otherwise unusual and illegal headers in. This may be a bug.