[POLL] NNTP support for Cyrus?

[Michael Bacon]

Well, I'm late to the picnic again (therein lies the danger of sieving list 
traffic into a separate folder -- too easy to ignore), but I'm definitely 
intrigued by this concept.  Just this morning, several folks on the staff 
here and I were discussing how to better utilize netnews as an alternative 
to e-mail for mass communication.

Client-side support isn't something that we'd be terribly interested in.  I 
generally think of NNTP for client side stuff as a nasty hack that I wish 
would go away, and which should be replaced by IMAP, but the world doesn't 
always agree with me.

Server-side support, on the other hand, would definitely be good.  While we 
can do the INN/Cyrus combination to get news over IMAP, a straight nntp 
feed to cyrus would be cleaner.  I guess in that case client-side would 
allow us to do away with INN altogether, but I'm not sure that's a real 
advantage.

The big one I'm curious about is mailstore replication.  I can see how you 
could deliver messages to one store and syncronize them to others via NNTP, 
but how would you propogate moves, deletions, flag state changes, etc? 
Would it be a host of new types of control messages passed via NNTP?  Or 
would you track those some other way?  I suppose you could modify MUPDATE 
to do some of it, but it still seems like message relocation becomes a 
problem.

Anyway, just some thoughts.  It's definitely an interesting idea.

Michael Bacon
Duke University


--On Tuesday, September 24, 2002 20:03:59 -0400 Ken Murchison 
<ken at oceana.com> wrote:

> I started off on a little test project that Larry and I have been
> kicking around, and I wanted to get some feedback from the list.
>
> As people may or may not know, you can setup Cyrus to store usenet
> newsgroups in IMAP folders.  Currently, the best known solution for
> feeding articles to Cyrus is to use 'imapfeed' which is in the
> development branch of INN (there is also a patch against INN 2.2.1 in
> netnews/).  In working on 'imapfeed' (porting to SASLv2, etc), it
> occured to me that some sites might be partial to different news server
> software, or might prefer to not have a separate news server at all.
>
> So, how many people (if any) are interested in seeing NNTP support built
> into Cyrus?  I'm interested in hearing about both server-side and
> client-side support.
>
> server-side (server/server transfer):
> - would allow articles to be fed directly to Cyrus from _any_ NNTP
> server (either your own, or your ISP's)
> - might allow for easy mailstore replication
>
> client-side support (reading/posting)
> - allow your clients to read articles from the same server/storage via
> either IMAP or NNTP
>
>
> FWIW, I already have a working nntpd prototype in the 2.2 branch of
> CVS.  The server-side support works in both streaming and non-streaming
> modes.  I have only tested this with INN doing the feeding.  The
> client-side support works with Pine for both reading and posting
> (articles are not fed upstream yet).  Neither Netscape nor Outlook seem
> happy with the current client-side support as them both appear to depend
> on the XOVER extension.
>
> Ken
> --
> Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
> Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
> 716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
> --PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
>
>