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From: per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: The anomolous handling of bad dates in cnews.
Message-ID: <1991Jun3.105621.23764@eua.ericsson.se>
Date: 3 Jun 91 10:56:21 GMT
References: <b8bHel-b@cs.psu.edu> <1991May23.115029.10971@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1991May28.232833.22503@world.std.com>
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In article <1991May28.232833.22503@world.std.com>, geoff@world.std.com
(Geoff Collyer) writes:
|> Per Hedeland:
|> >Well, my main problem (like, I gather, Neil Rickert's) is indeed with
|> >mail gatewayed to news (via inews - and if this is a "bad idea" please
|> >suggest alternatives - given the discussions here, I can't really see
|> >relaynews being it).
|> 
|> Rich Salz's mail2news is supposed to be quite good at this.  inews is
|> currently really too slow for this job and isn't really intended for it.

Well, mail2news isn't an *alternative* to inews (the default config is
for it to call inews), but perhaps mail2news + relaynews is? Soo, how
does mail2news (now the "officially" sanctioned way of gatewaying mail
to C news:-) deal with the Date: line in the mails? - It uses getdate!
And if even getdate fails, it uses the current date!! (Shudder...:-)

[ discussion of the ugly date examples I provided deleted ]

As I said, I don't claim they are valid, the point is a) that they were
acceptable to all the mailers they passed through, and presumably the
authors or their sysadmins have limited interest in the fact that I'm
unable to feed their letters into my local newsgroup, and b) that
getdate *did* make some sense of them (as has been pointed out before,
it doesn't matter if the result is a few hours wrong, that's exactly
what happens when e.g. getabsdate ignores unknown timezones).

--Per Hedeland
per@erix.ericsson.se  or
per%erix.ericsson.se@sunic.sunet.se  or
...uunet!erix.ericsson.se!per