Maybe after the dust has settled it would be worth investigating to install a local NNTP server (INN) and the mailman-to-usenet gateway? Or some way to give an NNTP server access to the mailman archive? (I don't know how the archive is stored in mailman... is it just a collection of mail files, 1 message per file?)
Of course it would require some study and maybe some hacks, it would e.g. be nice when the NNTP server authenticates the users using the mailman accounts (until we have that general authentication service, at least...)
Rob
On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 07:28:36PM +0200, Rob Janssen wrote:
(I don't know how the archive is stored in mailman... is it just a collection of mail files, 1 message per file?)
It's a single mbox format file that is broken up into individual messages which are stored in directories by date. A script to feed them into an NNTP posting program. There are currently over 10,000 such messages.
Of course it would require some study and maybe some hacks, it would e.g. be nice when the NNTP server authenticates the users using the mailman accounts (until we have that general authentication service, at least...)
There are difficulties.
The Mailman authentication data is stored as a Python 'pickle' (compressed dictionary file). There is a program to export a list of users, but it does not permit querying a single specific user, nor does it export passwords.
NNTP has a Perl hook for authentication. Someone would have to write a Python program that could extract the necessary per-user data from the Python dictionary, and be called from the Perl NNTP authenticator.
Across the Atlantic. The NNTP server is in England, the Mailman mailing list is in San Diego. - Brian
-
Brian Kantor -
Rob Janssen