Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!stl!robobar!ronald From: ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: LET'S NAME THE GUILTY POSTING SOFTWARE!!! Message-ID: <1991Jun20.212339.1464@robobar.co.uk> Date: 20 Jun 91 21:23:39 GMT References: <6098@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <1991Jun20.114358.4871@mp.cs.niu.edu> <6102@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> Organization: Robobar Ltd., Perivale, Middx., ENGLAND. Lines: 36 In article <6102@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber) writes: > The REAL problem as I see it is that the inews in the news transport does > not to an adequate job of checking headers and returning bad articles to the > user. Seems reasonable to me. > Now, we could add some smarts to mini-inews to move the detection closer to > the user. How does this fix the REAL problem? It doesn't? How surprising :-) > I am concerned that mini-inews > and the real inews may disagree on header processing issues. Right now with > CNEWS, header processing is a moving target. That doesn't sound right to me. The target is, of course, 822, 1036 and HR. Yeah, that changes from time to time, but not that often ;-) Now, given that the problems of both a) how to gateway mail->news and b) making sure the local mailer works need to be solved anyway, why not solve those *properly*, then use the resulting technology and _always post via the mailer_ ? Sure, there's some issues to resolve, like the status of headers like Newsgroups: etc. But at least the mechanisms like return-to-sender-on-error, etc are already there to use. And just run an SMTP server on every NNTP host, configuring the local active file into its mail alias table? Seems like the "cleanest" solution to me. At the very least, it means that you only have to maintain news verification software on the servers -- a real issue if you really think that the target moves. -- Ronald Khoo +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)