Q: NNTP server in Python?

[Jan Kybic]

Hello,
	is there a NNTP (News) server written in Python? I have just
found sockserv which provides some foundation, so I do not think it
should be very difficult.

Motivation: My potential application is a mail to news server. To be
more clear, I am still looking for an ideal mail reader. I quite like
Emacs Gnus because it is usable in both graphical environment and in
the console, handles international characters, and presents the
familiar Emacs interface I use for all my other text processing
tasks. On the other hand, I do not like Gnus's mail sorting
abilities. I do not find it flexible enough and now with all the mail
I have accumulated (180MB), it starts to be slow, and finding old
mails is a pain.

For mail handling, I loved the vfolder idea of sqmail (a mail reader
written in Python), which stores the mail in a SQL database. However,
I do not want to learn yet another interface, need to cope with
missing features, I want to avoid mouse-clicking, be able to work from
the console, etc. Briefly, I like the engine but I am not too hot
about the interface.

So, the idea was to marry these two technologies. Let incoming
messages be put into the database and present them to Gnus as if there
were newsgroups, using a local news server written in Python, which
would basically translate NNTP requests to SQL. There should be a file
defining the mapping between newsgroup mails and database views. It
should be also possible to generate ad hoc queries, such as
momentarily subscribing to a newsgroup:

from.alice.and.to.bob.and.date.last.week

which would promptly return all relevant mails.

I am not too much concern about deleting old mails. It is relatively
simple to come up with filters identifying junk and other disposable
mail, which can be expired automatically. And I prefer not to delete
any personal mail.

Any thoughts are welcome.

Jan



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Jan Kybic <Jan.Kybic at epfl.ch>      BIG IOA DMT EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland
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