[Mailman-Developers] NNTP gateway proposal

[Barry Warsaw]

Hi Joshua,

It's been a long time since I looked at the details of the NNTP gateway, so
most of my knowledge is probably pretty dated.  I know this Message-ID issue
is pretty annoying though.

On May 24, 2011, at 02:41 PM, Joshua Cranmer wrote:

>So, one of my most annoying problems with mailman is the operation of its
>mail-news gateway. Due to the rewriting of message-IDs, most ways of sending
>messages causes threading to horribly break.
>
>My proposal is this: optimize for the common case and avoid rewriting message
>IDs if not necessary. In other words, if the given message ID does not
>already exist on the server, do not rewrite the message ID. To handle most
>common cases of cross-posting to multiple mailing lists, find all mailing
>lists in the to/cc headers and use those to find all of the newsgroups.
>
>Additionally, if it turns out that the message ID needs to be rewritten, the
>old message ID would be additionally saved to the references header. While it
>won't fix the threading totally, it should preserve some sense of the
>structure.
>
>The biggest potential pitfall I see is if multiple mail servers inject the
>message into Usenet via different NNTP servers, so that some of Usenet sees
>it one group and some see it in some other group.
>
>What are your thoughts on this?

It sounds pretty reasonable to me.  Perhaps you can file a bug and tag it
'mailman3' so your proposal doesn't get lost in the archives?

Looking at cross-posting should be easier with Mailman 3 because we've gotten
rid of the list-centric silos, or the horrible overhead of hacking around them
that MM2 required.

-Barry

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