[Mailman-Users] Re: Usenet gating and archiving

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "SS" == Stephan Spencer <sms at netconcepts.com> writes:

    SS> I want to use Mailman's post-wrapper to send messages that we
    SS> approve through Mailman on to the newsgroup we're
    SS> moderating. Except Mailman doesn't put the required "Approved"
    SS> line in the header, so the posting to Usenet gets
    SS> rejected. Will you guys be fixing this so that the gating
    SS> works with moderated newsgroups?

I use Mailman to gate the moderated newsgroup
comp.lang.python.announce.  The approach I've taken (which so far
seems to be working) is to set up two lists, one which manages the
Usenet moderation, and the other that manages the mailing list
gateway.  There's one trick, which you'll see below.

Here's essentially the sendmail aliases I have in place:

-------------------- snip snip --------------------
## Newsgroup moderators
python-announce:     announce-moderators
announce-moderators: clpya.moderators at where.they.are.com

## Mailman aliases
python-announce-list:         python-announce
python-announce-list-admin:   "|/export/parrot/mailmalt/mail/wrapper mailowner p
ython-announce-list"
python-announce-list-request: "|/export/parrot/mailmalt/mail/wrapper mailcmd pyt
hon-announce-list"
owner-python-announce-list: python-announce-list-admin
python-announce-list-owner: python-announce-list-admin
-------------------- snip snip --------------------

Normally, people wanting to make announcements should send them to
python-announce at python.org.  These get forwarded to the moderators,
and when approved eventually show up on the n.g. (how the moderators
actually do this is magic to me :-).

Folks can subscribe to announcements via python-announce-list which
sucks messages off Usenet and does its thing.  The trick is that
python-announce-list forwards messages to python-announce and /not/ to
the Mailman wrapper.  Otherwise, random users would post to
python-announce-list and the message would go out to the membership
without having gone through the Usenet moderators.  Not good.  This is
the one modification you need to make to the aliases that bin/newlist
spits out.

This way, because Mailman treats Usenet postings as already approved,
nothing more needs to happen.

-Barry