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mail<->news issues

[sent to info-dylan@ai.mit.edu]

As you may know, I maintain a bidirectional gateway to and from the
info-dylan@ai.mit.edu mailing list and the comp.lang.dylan newsgroup. 

Keith "eagle eyes" Playford recently noticed that some messages
originally posted to the newsgroup hadn't made it to the mailing list.
It turns out the news server I use, news.lcs.mit.edu had "lost" the
articles in question.  For your amusement, I include an excerpt from
the reply I received from a sysadmin in response to my query:

    Well, the obvious answer is that the spam filter ate it, but that
    doesn't look likely for this particular article.

    As you can see:
    >   Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!newsswitch.lcs.mit.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!sn-xit-01!supernews.com!rQ66!news.supernews.com!not-for-mail

    ...this article actually passed through LCS on its way to SIPB.  I see
    nothing in the headers of the article that would cause it not to be
    sent.  It's possible that it simply arrived at a ``bad time'' for the
    news server, and it dropped off the end of a queue before the server
    got around to accepting it.

In other words, they have no idea what happened to those dropped
articles.  I've sent by hand the two articles Keith noticed: a recent
message in the "Using C structs with FD 2.0 FFI" thread from Chris
Double, and "NML for Dylan" from David McClain posted about a week
ago.

The other news server I can think of using is news.mit.edu, which does
include the two known lost articles.  However, it seems to have a
significant lag time -- up to a day to get a posted article, and I
found one article (from rwk@americom.com on 3/27/00) that made it to
news.lcs.mit.edu but not news.mit.edu.  Arrrgh!
So either way I'm screwed.

I'm soliciting suggestions -- ones that don't involve tracking
multiple servers and keeping a database of article ids (I know that's
the right thing to do, but I can't commit to doing that anytime soon).

Now of course this problem wouldn't arise if everyone just used the
mailing list!

To subscribe to the mailing list, BTW, simply send email to
majordomo@ai.mit.edu with the following line for the body:

	subscribe info-dylan

If you want to subscribe at a particular address, such as
jqpublic@my-isp.com, your message body should instead be:

	subscribe info-dylan jqpublic@my-isp.com

For anyone who wants to update, or replace, the scripts I wrote to
link the newsgroup and mailing list, I've put them on my web page. 
The setup is extremely simple:

  * mail2news:  the alias for the mailing list calls a little perl
      script which throws away a few headers and then sends the
      message to the newsgroup via mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu, a 
      mail2news service.

  * news2mail: I have a cron job that runs a perl script every 15
      minutes.  The script records in a file the last article id it
      processed.  The script connects to the news server, gets all
      articles numbered higher than the last-processed id, checks for
      "skippable", and if OK, sends the articles to the mailing list. 
      An article is considered skippable if it looks like it
      originated from the mail2news gateway mentioned above.

I'm not proud of them, but they (mostly) work.
-- 
Greg      gregs@ai.mit.edu (617)253-5807
Sullivan  http://www.ai.mit.edu/~gregs/