LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 16:50:47 +0930

Re: private Usenet news groups

On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 04:16:58PM +0930, Daryl Tester wrote:
> "Alan Kennington" <akenning@topology.org> wrote:
> 
> > That would solve many linuxSA "split the group" problems.
> 
> Except that newbies are more likely to use email than
> news - if you restrict the newsgroups distribution, then
> they will only be able to post to one or two servers,
> whereas email they can send from anywhere.


Okay. That cuts out the NNTP solution.

Is there any majordomo-like e-mail software which
can automatically ensure that recipients get only
one copy of each cross-posted message?

The idea would be that the e-mail server software
would somehow see which groups are to be sent to,
and then send the mail to all users who are
subscdribed to one or more of the indicated groups,
and then send only one copy to each such user,
and there would be one header per group that
is indicated.

If such software is not available, then it might be a good
contribution to the net to write such software.
It could be done as an extension to majordomo or something.

Subject tags like [flame] and [OT] can help with
filtering on the recipient side, but that doesn't
stop the mail from using up the bandwidth for
dial-up users.

-------------------------------------------------
There's a little problem with setting up a mailing-list
server to do the right thing.
If someone sent to linuxsa-start@... and
linuxsa-flame@..., then the server would receive two copies
of the mail -- well, maybe with SMTP what happens is that
there's only one copy, but it is sent to two unix users
called linuxsa-start and linuxsa-flame, and then the
majordomo thing has to look at all the To: and Cc:
lines for all destinations of the form linux-* and
use these for deciding who to send to.
And then the majordomo-thing must just throw away
the second copy that arrives.

A big advantage of this versus an NNTP-based system
would be that no one has to change anything
if they want to minimise their fuss factor.
I.e. there would be no transition trauma.
Life is too full of transition trauma already.
If you have to fill out 3 BAS forms per quarter
like I do, then you'll know what I'm talking about when
you see what they've done to the BAS this time!

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.


-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject