Mail-to-News Gateways
From Usenet Big-8 Management Board
Historical Note
One of the first subdivisions of newsgroups was into "FA" (From Arpanet) and "net" (all the other newsgroups).
The material from Arpanet was primarily mail-to-news. Originally, it was a one-way connection, but later it must have been bi-directional because I have read about the Arpanet participants flaming clueless Usenet newbies.
Definition
A Gateway transforms an article into the native message format of
another medium, or translates the messages of another medium into news
articles. Encapsulation of a news article into a message of MIME type
application/news-transmission, or the subsequent undoing of that
encapsulation, is not gatewaying, since it involves no transformation
of the article.
There are two basic types of Gateway, the Outgoing Gateway that
transforms a news article into a different type of message, and the
Incoming Gateway that transforms a message from another medium into a
news article and injects it into a netnews system. These are handled
separately below.
The primary dictate for a gateway is:
Above all, prevent loops.
Mail-to-News Gateways
From: newgroups-request@uunet.uu.net (David C Lawrence) Subject: Mailing Lists Available in Usenet Date: 25 Nov 1996 18:16:19 -0500 Message-ID: <gateways.n_848963777@uunet.uu.net> Summary: A list of mailing lists gatewayed with worldwide newsgroups Gateways exist in several forms. They can be fully bi-directional between the list and the group, one way from the list to the group, or only partially passed from the group to the list and back, with the list moderator selecting articles which are appropriate. Lists can also be packaged as digests --- multiple messages bound in a single collection --- and possibly appear as such in the corresponding group. Traffic on mailing lists whose incoming traffic from the corresponding newsgroup is unrestricted is often very unlike that which comes to lists that solely exist in the mail realm. This is because of differences of the two overall environments and how they are used by people. Both list members and group participants should be wary of it and try to be sympathetic with the other side, but this is often a point missed by the group users who don't even realise their articles are being redistributed via an automatic gateway. Gateways that have moderators which review submissions are listed in a companion posting, "List of Moderators for Usenet". As noted in that article, most modern news system software supports automatic submission to the moderator of articles posted to the group. If that mechanism does not work at your site you will have to directly mail your article to the submission address. Mailing lists also have administrative contact addresses for reaching the people who run them. These addresses are meant to be used for issues pertaining to the operation of the lists, rather than for messages which are meant to be published in the list.
| Links |
|---|
| NNTP Gateway for Usenet (vbulletin) |
| Gmane (e-mail to NNTP archive--not integrated with Usenet) "Mail To News And Back Again") |
| Mailman (buggy?) |
| News2Mail (read only) |
| News::Gateway (Allbery) |
| Newsadmin gateway |
| newsgate |
| news-to-web software |
| news-archive |
| news-web |
| A PHP-driven news-to-web archive |
| news.reader.org |
| This list is for informational purposes only. |
Listing a service here does not mean that the Board endorses the service.
A Note on Netiquette
People should not hook up gateways like this without the prior consent of the mailing list owner. Consultation with the newsgroup is advised as well, although that may be difficult with an unmoderated newsgroup.
