[POLL] NNTP support for Cyrus?

[Ken Murchison]

Scott Russell wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 08:03:59PM -0400, Ken Murchison wrote:
> > 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
> 
> Will it scale? Cyrus IMAPd has some decent scalability in it. What
> about the nntpd side? Between flooding lmtpd with incoming emails and
> nntpd with incoming news feeds, how will the deliver databases hold up?

Well, if you're already feeding news into Cyrus via LMTP, then you
_shouldn't_ see any difference.  By using a separate nntpd service,
we're also free to use a different database if it is needed.  A separate
database would almost certainly be needed for reader support because the
needs are different.

> I personally don't have a need for this right now but it does sound
> like a very cool 'gee wiz' feature though. I'm just throwing out some
> thoughts to be chewed on.
> 
> > client-side support (reading/posting)
> > - allow your clients to read articles from the same server/storage via
> > either IMAP or NNTP
> 
> I'm a bit surprised at the need for nntp READ support though when
> anonymous IMAP mailboxes can be setup instead. I would guess though
> that people would be more failure with a 'newsgroup' than an
> anonymous IMAP mailbox.

Yes, I agree that it isn't _needed_.  The problem that I've seen with
reading news via IMAP is that the client always wants to post/respond to
the sender's email address rather than the newsgroup.  I have made this
a little bit better by having imapfeed/nntpd add a To: header with the
address used to post to the newsgroup mailbox (ie,
post+netnews.comp.mail.imap at oceana.com in my case).  But this requires
that you have lmtp2nntp configured to get the article to go upstream.

So the biggest (only?) advantage that I see to having client-side NNTP
support is that it would be business as usual for the users.

Thanks for the feedback,
Ken
-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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