Message-Id / mail2news gateways.

This is for all the volunteers who are working on setting up the
distributed cypherpunks mailing lists.

1) Please preserver Message-Ids while resending messages. The
Message-Id is intended to be unique to a message and can be used
to reject duplicates. Usenet software in particular, detects
duplicates by Message-Id.

2) In response to Igor's query, I would very much like at least
on of the distributed lists to be set up such that messages sent
there will *not* be gatewayed to Usenet. As I mentioned, I will
not post to Usenet with my real email address, and if all lists
get gatewayed to alt.cypherpunks, I have to set up fake email
headers to mail to the lists also. If at least one of the
lists can gaurantee that it won't be gatewayed to Usenet, I
don't have to do that, and as a nice bonus, Prof. Froomkin
can continue to be active on cypherpunks.

This can be achieved by the list software adding an
"X-Post-to-Usenet: No" or some similar header to every
message it sends out. Also a header, such as X-List:
should be set to indicate under which mailing list a message
first entered the system. This will be worthless unless all
the list servers honor these headers.

Thanks.

--
Anil Das

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At 08:59 PM 2/17/97 -0800, Anil Das wrote:

>1) Please preserver Message-Ids while resending messages.

Yes, this is absolutely crucial if many different systems are going to
cooperatively deal with messages. Message-ID changing is very bad. I sent a
Perl script to Lance (copies to others on request) which can be easily used
as the target of an /etc/aliases entry to gate a mailing list into inews (and
thereby into INN) for processing as a netnews message. (The script preserves
Message-ID.) If we preserve Message-ID's, many sites can have local mail-news
gateways, and we won't (globally) see duplicates. 

>2) In response to Igor's query, I would very much like at least
>on of the distributed lists to be set up such that messages sent
>there will *not* be gatewayed to Usenet.

I don't think this is practical - as I understand things, the corpus (bolus?)
of messages will be available to all comers for their own projects, which may
include mail-news gateways, archives, filtered lists, and so forth(*). People
who send messages to the list shouldn't expect that they'll have any
"privacy" in information sent there. 

(* Modulo copyright, but apparently the industry standards for copyright
issues are:

1.	Ignore them and hope they go away
2.	Pretend to seize control over IP rights of everything posted

neither of which works very well or makes any sense, legally speaking.)

For what it's worth, the list has been gated to two public newsgroups -
albeit not in the Big 7 or alt. - for quite some time. If you think your name
isn't on Usenet, and you've been sending messages to the list, think again.


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--
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