Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:2791 news.software.b:4195
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!decwrl!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!herron.uucp!jbrown
From: jbrown@herron.uucp (Jordan Brown)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.software.b
Subject: Re: Summary: Integrating Internet mail with News
Message-ID: <278@herron.uucp>
Date: 18 Feb 90 08:25:07 GMT
References: <1990Feb12.141913.2515@cs.hope.edu> <265@herron.uucp> <25DC072E.292@tct.uucp>
Reply-To: jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov
Lines: 35

In article <25DC072E.292@tct.uucp>, chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
> According to jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov:
> >>           foo: "| /usr/lib/news/inews -h -a rfc -n mail.foo"
> >I had a problem with this in that it leaves the Message-Id alone.
> >This is fine unless you mail a message to two such lists, ...
> ...  Instead of dropping it, why not arrange a method of cross-posting?

I'd be delighted to.  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell most schemes
that route into separate "| whatever" aliases generate multiple
postings.  You can try to extract the destination from the To: line
of the message, but for national mailing lists that doesn't work very
well because of the variations in the format of the address.
(Between source routing, ! routing, quoting, decnet, etc, I wasn't
able to come up with a sed script that would reliably extract the
mailing list name.  This ignores the possibility that the original
message was addressed to the list by a different name...)
Then, of course, you have to look at CC, Resent-{to,cc}, Apparently-to,
and perhaps other headers too.

I finally gave up and decided that, for my application (mostly gatewaying
local and national lists one-way into news), the simplicity and reliability
of recnews beat the crossposting-handling of the scheme that extracted
the mailing list from the headers.  (Besides, recnews threw away the
Received lines, which was overall a win and a little tough to do with sed.)

The "|inews -h -n mail.foo" scheme loses utterly, though, in that it
drops the second and later groups of a crosspost on the floor.
(I used it for a few hours, until I mailed a message to a half-dozen
groups noting that I'd changed the distribution scheme and to tell me
about problems... and noticed that my message only arrived in one group.)

If somebody has a better idea I'd love to hear it...
-- 
Jordan Brown
jbrown@jato.jpl.nasa.gov