[Mailman-Users] a few questions about the NNTP gateway

[Brad Knowles]

On 8/6/07, Manlio Perillo wrote:

>  I'm using Mailman 2.1.5.

BTW, the most recent version of Mailman is 2.1.9, which has a number 
of new features and some fixes for certain security holes.  I'd 
strongly encourage you to upgrade.

>  I have enabled the NNTP Gateway but there are some problems.
>
>  1) The messages from the newsgroup are not sent on the mailing list.
>     I don't know why, there is nothing in the error log

Go to the web admin page for your list, then go to the sub-page for 
"Mail<->News gateways".  Is the news server hostname filled in?  Is 
the newsgroup name filled in?  Is the moderation policy set 
correctly?  Do you have the radio buttons set correctly for passing 
traffic both ways?

In your mm_cfg.py file, do you have the correct definitions for the 
username and password you need to use when logging into the news 
server to retrieve and post articles?

>  2) When sending a message to the newsgroup, Mailman does not obscure the
>     email address
>     (there is an obscure_addresses, but it only works for the web
>     archiver)

Correct.  Mailman does not attempt to obscure addresses when posting 
mail messages to a newsgroup.

>  I would like to know if 2) has been implemented in recent Mailman releases.

Not so far as I know, but it shouldn't be hard to add.  However, one 
problem you'll have is that many news servers will reject your 
articles, if you use an address obfuscation scheme that they don't 
support.

So, your choices are to not do any obfuscation at all for news 
articles (which is what Mailman does today), or see if there is some 
common format of obfuscation that virtually all news servers are 
known to support.

Of course, if they support it then the spammers probably already know 
about it as well, and anything you can do they are likely to be able 
to un-do.

>  One last thing.
>  What happens when Mailman have to send an email message with a broken
>  Subject header (R: instead of Re) to the newsgroup?

I think what happens is that the subject header will get treated as a 
normal subject, and may have additional things tacked onto the front 
of the subject line, whereas normally Mailman would have recognized 
the "Re:" portion and potentially tacked those things on between the 
"Re:" string(s) and the rest of the subject.

But one of the core Mailman developers would be more likely to know 
the answer to that question, and they're also on this list. 
Hopefully they'll be able to respond to you within a few days.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>

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