OT: mail-news gateway question

[Aahz]

[I'm not familiar with the Mailman package, but I'm moderately
knowledgable about mail and news, so I'm answering this generically.]

In article <slrnadauei.9uf.grante at tuxtop.visi.com>,
Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:
>
>How does the python news/mail gateway work?  Somebody recently told me
>that such gateways work by making the group moderated and having the
>"moderator" e-mail address set to the mailing list.  Is this true?

Nope.  News->Mail consists of an NNTP client that collects posts from
comp.lang.python and forwards them (probably via SMTP) to python-list.
Conversely, Mail->News consists of an e-mail client (probably POP3, but
might be IMAP) that polls a mailbox and then injects news either directly
to the news server (such as INN) or by using an NNTP client.

Moderation *may* be involved, and e-mail is always involved when there's
moderation (modulo spam and some other special cases), but a gateway is
in-and-of-itself no indicator of moderation.

>Looking at the headers in c.l.p, I don't see any "approved:" headers,
>and the NNTP-posting host seems to vary from posting to posting.

Note that c.l.py is a bidirectional gateway; many people post directly
to the newsgroup.  People who post to python-list should all have the
same NNTP-Posting-Host.  You can tell gatewayed e-mail by looking for
the X-Mailman-Version header (or any of several other obvious headers).
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"I used to have a .sig but I found it impossible to please everyone..."  --SFJ