From: daz <dooby@...10.karoo.co.uk>
Date: 2004-06-04T05:08:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Reply wasn't posted; will test new post


From: "David A. Black" <dblack@wobblini.net>
>
> On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, Dennis Oelkers wrote:
>
> >
> > My further investigations proved that this is really the problem. The
> > symptoms are the same as with the first problem (I get a 441 - "Followup
> > without a reference" - when posting the mail to the newsgroup), but this
> > time the solution is non-trivial. The first case ("In-Reply-To" flag in
> > header but not "References" flag) was solved by adding the missing flag
> > by duplicating the message-id of the "In-Reply-To" flag. In this case
> > both flags are missing. The MUA which was used by Austin Ziegler adds
> > "Thread-Topic" / "Thread-Index" flags to the header which are supposed
> > to solve the threading, but this is not applicable to Usenet.
> >
> > This leads to the conclusion that we have three possible solutions:
> > - Add an "In-Reply-To"/"References" flag to the header by using the
> >    message-id of THAT mail => the message would appear on c.l.r., but
> >    threading would be broken
> > - drop the message on the floor at the gateway => ruby-talk / c.l.r.
> >    are inconsistent
> > - my solution: as mua's are more or less allowed to do whatever they
> >    want my fear is that we get more and more of such borderline cases
> >    so the only solution is that we establish identical posting policies
> >    on both the mailing-list host and the gateway/nntp host we're posting
> >    too. (ML-Maintainers? Any Comments on this one?)
>
> I (reluctantly) would opt for the first one, if it's the likeliest way
> to get all messages through.  Maybe for messages with "Re:" but no
> References: you could add X-Missing-Reference header or
> something... so that some day if someone figures out a way to fix it
> we can easily find them :-)
>

Couldn't it be solved simply by changing params.rb ...

     module Params

       # name of the news server
       NEWS_SERVER = "news.zrz.tu-berlin.de"

       # [...]

     end

... such that it refers to a Usenet server rather than an NNTP host
which links with a Usenet news server ?

Can Dennis plug straight into the German Research Network (DFN.DE)
or is that what's imposing the rigid restrictions ?

I'm repeating, but if mirroring works for me through my news service
and not for him then all of these different header permutations are
permissible within Usenet.

I notice that DFN runs a service http://news.individual.net/server.html
which necessarily has safeguards.  I was going to see if it was
possible for me to mirror through them but rule one states that the
Sender cannot be anyone except the user.  Fair enough.


daz