RE: Infrastructure needs

On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 16:07, Morgen Sagen wrote:
>
> > [...] most people will
> > continue to interact with the mailing lists rather than the
> > news server, resulting in the threading on the news server
> > being frequently broken due to sub-par MUAs replying via the
> > mailing list.
> > [...]
> 
> Michael,
> 
> Having never run an NNTP <--> mailinglist gateway, I'm not aware of this
> particular problem.  Can you explain?  Is this a mail header issue?

Yes, it's a mail header issue, not too different from the issue of
threading in a mailing list.

If an MUA is used to compose a reply where that MUA does not add
'References:' or 'In-Reply-To:' headers, than when the message is
gatewayed to the NNTP server, there is no way for a newsreader to
reconstruct a thread.

This is just as problematic as on a mailing list, except that it is
completely unnecessary. NNTP clients invariably support the appropriate
headers, as threading is central to the Net News medium, while many
email clients do not.

In short, gatewaying the mailing list (unless it is most people's second
choice, as with the comp.lang.python newsgroup) removes one of the NNTP
server's main advantages, that of strong explicit threading.

I suppose it's possible for the gateway to *guess* what the
'References:' header should be based on the subject (and maybe the
mailman gateway does this), but that's not much of an improvement.

Cheers,

Michael Bernstein.

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