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From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Re: New groups coming in without newgroup?
Message-ID: <19249@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Fri, 5-Jun-87 09:39:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.19249
Posted: Fri Jun  5 09:39:09 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 8-Jun-87 05:36:24 EDT
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So! Your site just got newgroups for 83 new newsgroups and you never
saw any discussion. Well, that's leakage from the Internet. The plan
is very simple: netnews is a terrific conferencing system, why use
mailing lists? So we're making newsgroups for every mailing list that
is in the ARPANET List of Lists, and gatewaying those lists to the
newsgroups at Berkeley (yours truly is coordinating the gateway).
This stuff is all going out with distribution "inet" (for Internet)
so that the general USENET doesn't see it (in theory).

If you're on the ARPA Internet somewhere and you got the newgroup
messages, relax, you were supposed to get them. If you don't want
them, contact your netnews feed, and ask them to fix their "sys" file
so you don't get them. This was all discussed on the nntp-manangers
mailing list (archives available for public FTP from ucbarpa.berkeley.edu
in pub/NNTP-Managers.arch, right now about 150K).

If you're not on the ARPA Internet, but you DO want this stuff, find
someone on the Internet and ask them to send you the distribution "inet".

For those of you out on USENET far away from the nearest Internet node,
I will send out the list of mailing list to newsgroup gateways.  If
enough of the USENET decides that they want a group, I can trivially
remove the distribution so you can all get it (or not). I do plan on
coordinating this with the backbone group so that they don't get
inundated.

The plan I have for the "inet" distribution is to track the ARPANET
List of Lists as closely as possible. When a mailing list goes
moderated, so will its "inet" equivalent. If a list disappears (and
they do from time to time, usually due to lack of interest) so also
will the "inet" group disappear. And when new mailing lists appear, so
will an "inet" distribution newsgroups.

The win for those of you who are site postmasters should be obvious:
mailing list administration for those groups that are gatewayed into
newsgroups goes away. No more bouncing mail. No more adding/deleting
users from a centrally maintained list. Less network traffic (one
message copy per Organization/LAN comes in by netnews; can be as many
as one per user/host pair with a mailing list).

	NNTP service with a :-)

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu