[Mailman-Developers] Usenet gateway posting issue

[Mark Sapiro]

Due to the recent death and reincarnation of mail.python.org, we had to
find a new news server as a gateway to/from a few python.org lists.

I ran into an issue with the server we are now using. This is described
at <https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1512866>.

The issue has to do with posts that may arrive via email to a list and
are thus gated to usenet. Posts which are gated from usenet to the list
are just posted to the list and are never gated back to usenet.

The issue is if a post arrives by email and already contains a
Newsgroups: header, the gateway will ensure that the group it gates to
is in the header, adding it if necessary. This can result in posts gated
to usenet with a Newsgroups: header mentioning other groups in addition
to the gating list's group. In our case, this seemed to cause a reject
if the other group didn't exist on the news server.

I thought about this and decided we shouldn't be gating posts to usenet
for groups other than the one(s) associated with the list and that the
correct fix is just to ensure that gated posts contain a single
Newsgroups: header mentioning only the target group(s).

Then it occurred to me that past behavior, in our case for example where
python-list gates to/from comp.lang.python and  python-announce-list
gates to/from comp.lang.python.announce that one could post by email to
only say python-list with a 'Newsgroups:
comp.lang.python,comp.lang.python.announce' header, the post would be
gated to the news server for both groups, and the next time the news
server is polled the post would come back for both lists and be posted
to python-announce-list (python-list would be bypassed because of
X-BeenThere:).

Note: that this scenario may or may not have 'Message-ID:' issues, but
assuming it works, my question is is this scenario a feature that people
actually use that I would break by only putting comp.lang.python in the
Newsgroups: header of posts gated from python-list or is it potentially
a bug that should be fixed.

Does anyone have an opinion on this?

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan