david@indetech.com (09/21/89)
In article <2202@erix.ericsson.se> per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland) writes: > We use recnews here too, but I think it has a couple of problems: > - it throws away the original Message-ID, causing inews to > generate a local one - not very nice if you want to reply to an > "article" - it sometimes gets confused about the sender address, > which ends up like From: \@local.host.address. I haven't had > opportunity to identify the exact circumstances under which that > happens. It may be fixed by patch #17, though - we're currently at > #14... > > Improvements to recnews or alternative suggestions are welcome... > I too had the problem of an appropriate gatewaying mechanism, in particular, one that worked with C news. I have written a Perl script that converts e-mail to netnews. It is meant to work with C news' relaynews avoiding the overhead of the C news inews shell script. It may be possible to replace relaynews with the B news inews, I haven't tried it. The script itself converts anything reasonable in the mail header to an appropriate news header. In particular, it maintains the Message-ID (Message-Id in the mail header). If there isn't one it makes up a C news style Message-ID from the date and originating site. This means that if two sites get the same message they should create the same Message-ID. This should address the concerns of chip@ateng.com (Chip Salzenberg) that he expressed in article <25155893.16096@ateng.com> about a SMOP (Small matter of programming) to insure that mail to news gateways preserve Message-ID. If you are reading this in as news then the script worked since I've set up a local alias. It does have a couple of deficiencies. It doesn't handle multi-line header fields (continuations that start with whitespace). It has perhaps missed some mapping from an e-mail header field that is common but not in RFC 822. It isn't well tested and our environment isn't typical. If you have any interest in it let me know. -- ____*_ David A. Kuder david@indetech.com \ / / Independence Technologies {sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!david \/ / 42705 Lawrence Place FAX: 415 438-2034 \/ Fremont, CA 94538 Voice: 415 438-2003