[POLL] NNTP support for Cyrus?

Michael Fair michael at daclubhouse.net
Tue Oct 1 21:35:43 EDT 2002


I've unfortunately never been on the admin side
of newsgroups but I've been an avid user of them
and think they are a great way to do mailing lists
and shared folders.

I've done both the binaries music stuff and 
discussion groups and found it to be extrmely
effective at sharing information, especially
when the client had a half decent clue of MIME
decoding, multipost files, and reply to the group
instead of the person.

The primary thing I find about my current situation
is that i'm on a bunch of mailing lists, and there
are a bunch of my friends on the same mailing lists
and it just seems to me it's a big old waste of 
bandwidth and disk space to have all these copies
lying around just for the convienence of checking
things in one of the subfolders of my inbox (not
to mention Sieve makes you write an elsif for every 
list you're subscribed to just to do a fileinto).
I regularly have to delete some folders just because
they got a couple hundred messages during the day.
I'd rather that be on someone else's hard drive
until I needed it.

There are also some lists that I want to get on, 
peruse, ask a couple questions, and get off.  
Newsgroups are fantastic for that too.

Also most IMAP clients I have used want to download
every subject line in a folder before doing anything
instead of 50 at a time (or whatever).  This makes
news reading very difficult as an IMAP Shared Folder.

So what I'm saying is, I'm an admin who wants to learn
the lay of the land when it comes to administering news
groups, how do they work, how can you setup a personal
group and what subscription controls to you have on the
groups stored their, how do you integrate the groups 
into the overall fabric of the news architecture?  I
realize that these are all questions better asked 
somewhere else, but they tell you where I and many
others like me are coming from,  I think I need a news 
server that can act like IMAP server with shared folders 
for ACLs (privacy and all that jazz) and allows me to 
use a news client for reading and then perhaps uses a 
third party gateway to all the people who really want 
mailing list type subscription and delivery.

This way any groups that I host are both news and list,
and any news or list that I support can be proxied to
the respective other method giving users at my domain
an easy access into all the worlds while still being
kind to the bandwidth and server resources.


I don't know the real solution since I haven't explored
it enough, but I'm getting fustrated at the current
proliferation of mailing lists that should be newsgroups,
and the barrier to entry (real or perceived) to setting
up simple centralized news servers for group information
transmission.  I can't say that I would immediately know
how to use the Cyrus NNTP daemon, but you can rest
assured that if someone came out with a howto on how
to ditch all my sieve scripts and set up an internal
news server (perhaps referred to as a list server) to
handle all my mailing list subscriptions so myself and
my colleagues could be just a few mouse clicks away
from being subscribed to whatever public lists we
wanted as well as the standard set of news groups
I'd be a very happy advocate and trainer once I learned
how it all fit together.

Like I said, I haven't thought it all the way through,
but I see newsgroups as a completely underutilized tool
on the Internet having giving way to the plethora of
mailing lists because they work with the same email
client everyone is used to using and the admins of
the list can set it up with web archival and policy
controls easily and without hassle.  Of course the
convienence comes at the cost of being an annoying
subscription process which involves modifying some
filtering script just to keep the floods out of the
INBOX and filed into their own folder and a whole slew
of individual mail transmissions to each subscribed
end user.


While I'm tempted to setup "Support" boxes for Technical
Support and Trouble Ticket repositories and I don't
see news or Shared Folders are a good solution to
the problem since you need some extra "state" logic.
Now I know this is blue skyish, but if some kind of
Trouble Ticket Request Tracker Application could somehow 
be easily integrated into an email workflow and MUA
interface (either via newsgroup or Shared Folder) then
I'd really feel I had the one size fits all solution
in mail servers (I'd say message servers but I'd still
need to integrate fax/voicemail/pager before I be complete
with the while universal message gateway thing).


I hope you are able to take all that and do something 
useful in terms of feedback with it.  But I guess I'm
like the rest of the posts here that say "Yeah that'd
be cool but I can't see how I'd instantly start using
it" but I do want to talk about the issue because I
think there are some solutions and message pathways
that i just haven't seen/explored yet.

-- Michael --

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ken Murchison" <ken at oceana.com>
To: "Cyrus Mailing List" <info-cyrus at andrew.cmu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 5:03 PM
Subject: [POLL] NNTP support for Cyrus?


> 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
> 




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