I've unfortunately never been on the admin side of newsgroups but I've been an avid user of them and think they are a great way to do mailing lists and shared folders. I've done both the binaries music stuff and discussion groups and found it to be extrmely effective at sharing information, especially when the client had a half decent clue of MIME decoding, multipost files, and reply to the group instead of the person. The primary thing I find about my current situation is that i'm on a bunch of mailing lists, and there are a bunch of my friends on the same mailing lists and it just seems to me it's a big old waste of bandwidth and disk space to have all these copies lying around just for the convienence of checking things in one of the subfolders of my inbox (not to mention Sieve makes you write an elsif for every list you're subscribed to just to do a fileinto). I regularly have to delete some folders just because they got a couple hundred messages during the day. I'd rather that be on someone else's hard drive until I needed it. There are also some lists that I want to get on, peruse, ask a couple questions, and get off. Newsgroups are fantastic for that too. Also most IMAP clients I have used want to download every subject line in a folder before doing anything instead of 50 at a time (or whatever). This makes news reading very difficult as an IMAP Shared Folder. So what I'm saying is, I'm an admin who wants to learn the lay of the land when it comes to administering news groups, how do they work, how can you setup a personal group and what subscription controls to you have on the groups stored their, how do you integrate the groups into the overall fabric of the news architecture? I realize that these are all questions better asked somewhere else, but they tell you where I and many others like me are coming from, I think I need a news server that can act like IMAP server with shared folders for ACLs (privacy and all that jazz) and allows me to use a news client for reading and then perhaps uses a third party gateway to all the people who really want mailing list type subscription and delivery. This way any groups that I host are both news and list, and any news or list that I support can be proxied to the respective other method giving users at my domain an easy access into all the worlds while still being kind to the bandwidth and server resources. I don't know the real solution since I haven't explored it enough, but I'm getting fustrated at the current proliferation of mailing lists that should be newsgroups, and the barrier to entry (real or perceived) to setting up simple centralized news servers for group information transmission. I can't say that I would immediately know how to use the Cyrus NNTP daemon, but you can rest assured that if someone came out with a howto on how to ditch all my sieve scripts and set up an internal news server (perhaps referred to as a list server) to handle all my mailing list subscriptions so myself and my colleagues could be just a few mouse clicks away from being subscribed to whatever public lists we wanted as well as the standard set of news groups I'd be a very happy advocate and trainer once I learned how it all fit together. Like I said, I haven't thought it all the way through, but I see newsgroups as a completely underutilized tool on the Internet having giving way to the plethora of mailing lists because they work with the same email client everyone is used to using and the admins of the list can set it up with web archival and policy controls easily and without hassle. Of course the convienence comes at the cost of being an annoying subscription process which involves modifying some filtering script just to keep the floods out of the INBOX and filed into their own folder and a whole slew of individual mail transmissions to each subscribed end user. While I'm tempted to setup "Support" boxes for Technical Support and Trouble Ticket repositories and I don't see news or Shared Folders are a good solution to the problem since you need some extra "state" logic. Now I know this is blue skyish, but if some kind of Trouble Ticket Request Tracker Application could somehow be easily integrated into an email workflow and MUA interface (either via newsgroup or Shared Folder) then I'd really feel I had the one size fits all solution in mail servers (I'd say message servers but I'd still need to integrate fax/voicemail/pager before I be complete with the while universal message gateway thing). I hope you are able to take all that and do something useful in terms of feedback with it. But I guess I'm like the rest of the posts here that say "Yeah that'd be cool but I can't see how I'd instantly start using it" but I do want to talk about the issue because I think there are some solutions and message pathways that i just haven't seen/explored yet. -- Michael -- ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ken Murchison" To: "Cyrus Mailing List" Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 5:03 PM Subject: [POLL] NNTP support for Cyrus? > I started off on a little test project that Larry and I have been > kicking around, and I wanted to get some feedback from the list. > > As people may or may not know, you can setup Cyrus to store usenet > newsgroups in IMAP folders. Currently, the best known solution for > feeding articles to Cyrus is to use 'imapfeed' which is in the > development branch of INN (there is also a patch against INN 2.2.1 in > netnews/). In working on 'imapfeed' (porting to SASLv2, etc), it > occured to me that some sites might be partial to different news server > software, or might prefer to not have a separate news server at all. > > So, how many people (if any) are interested in seeing NNTP support built > into Cyrus? I'm interested in hearing about both server-side and > client-side support. > > server-side (server/server transfer): > - would allow articles to be fed directly to Cyrus from _any_ NNTP > server (either your own, or your ISP's) > - might allow for easy mailstore replication > > client-side support (reading/posting) > - allow your clients to read articles from the same server/storage via > either IMAP or NNTP > > > FWIW, I already have a working nntpd prototype in the 2.2 branch of > CVS. The server-side support works in both streaming and non-streaming > modes. I have only tested this with INN doing the feeding. The > client-side support works with Pine for both reading and posting > (articles are not fed upstream yet). Neither Netscape nor Outlook seem > happy with the current client-side support as them both appear to depend > on the XOVER extension. > > Ken > -- > Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd. > Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place > 716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127 > --PGP Public Key-- http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp >