Re: Mailing lists and news archiving

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Chris Beggy <news@kippona.com> writes:

> I'm happy to peer for feeds, but I need to have an estimate of the rate
> of archive growth before I commit to /no expiry/ on those groups.

I'd also be happy to peer for feeds, and I can give some pointers on how
to send control messages and the like.

> Maybe Russ or somebody with deja-news.com experience can shed light on
> these issues.

Here are some things to think about:

 * Spammers troll Usenet for addresses aggressively, perhaps more so than
   with the web and definitely more than with mailing lists.  It's quite
   possible that when a mailing list is gated to Usenet, the spam load of
   the participants will increase.  At least, some people will worry about
   that and complain.

 * Most mailing lists actually are gated out there somewhere in some
   poorly distributed hierarchy.  There really needs to be some sort of
   central, organized hierarchy for gating mailing lists, but in the
   interim you can't really get away with using the mailing list message
   IDs since invariably you'll collide with some other gateway and you'll
   only see some of the messages.  That means assigning new message IDs
   to each message as you gate it, and that means rewriting References so
   that threading still works.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>