Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 3191
NNTP access: mail2news gateway mangles Message-ID
Last modified: 2004-10-15 04:13:08 UTC
The mail2news gateway mangles the Message-ID: header content in the way that the newsgroup name is prepended. This leads to broken threads if replies are posted via NNTP but read in mailing list, because the post has a References: header content with the mangled name in it, which of course is not available as a Message-ID in the mailing list. Furthermore, the mail2news gateway does not convert any already existing References: header content, so that replies originating from the mailing list are not threaded in news. If we don't fix this before going public with NNTP we'll just look silly. Solution: do not touch any Message-ID, NEVER! mail2news must convert all To: and Cc: header contents being known mailing list names to appropriate Newsgroups: header contents, generating a cross-posting if necessary. If the original mail doesn't have a Message-ID the gateway must of course generate a unique one. news2mail must convert all Newsgroups: header contents to appropriate To: header contents, and maintain a dupe database to not generate identical mails.
Hi, fixing this before offering the newgroups as alternatives to the mailinglists is a _must_. On the germanophone discusslist we received mulitple complaints from people outside the project (via news@OOo mostly) that the threading was broken and the newsgroups not usable like this... A lot of people are interested in using the newsgroups, let's fix this and tell the world about them, :-) Regards, Timon
Assigning to support to figure out what is going on with this.
Accepting.
Hi Taska, I took the liberty to set the priority on this to one. Why, you will ask: The reason is simpel: SUN will shut down the support newsservers for staroffice on March, 15th. For us, this is a unique opportunity to gahter new developers and users, if we have our newsserver working well at that point in time (meaning threading works). Moderation is not such a big issue, if necessary we can split moderation beteen a couple of people for each list, but threading, as it ist now, is inacceptable and will scare most people away. So please get this issue fixed before the 15th! Timon
Hi, I agree to Timon. It would be a great benefit if we can recruit some of these very expirenced StarOffice Certified Users for OOo. Some of them have already tested our newsgroups, but they left us after short time because the broken threading. You must know, that the StarOffice support groups are high traffic newsgroups, splitted in about 40 specialized groups. If we get the same traffic to our few user...-groups, it would be absloutely important to have a working threading. CU Jörg
The internal issue number for this is PCN8668; we've requested an update from the operations team about this.
I've gotten feedback from the developer on this. He says that mangling message IDs is a must, because of the way NNTP works. If we did not mangle message IDs, we would have problems with crosspostings (they would be seen as duplicates) and in other areas: >What if I'm subscribed to nbdev, nbui, and announce, and I send a >mail message to all three? It'll go through on the first two, but >not necessarily on announce -- the NNTP server has to be willing to >accept it for both nbdev and nbui, but not to assume that it can be >posted to announce automatically. And NNTP servers typically use >unique message IDs to avoid duplicate messages -- without regard to >the list of newsgroups, because that's how NNTP works. Apparently this was already brought up awhile back by the NetBeans folks, and we had the same answer from them. I'm going to assign this to Stefan for his feedback.
I can't believe that mangling Message-ID is a must. Just ask Mozilla how they do it with their mozilla-*@mozilla.org mailing lists and netscape.public.mozilla.* newsgroups, they seem to get it right.
Hi Has there been any progress on this issue since... April? louis
closing with worksforme b/c I'm not sure this is still relevant. Please reopen as needed. Louis
Hi Louis, sure this issue is still very relevant (Once issue 6848 is fixed of course). This makes the thread view of newsgroups/mailinglists unusable, which is a very often used feature! At the german lang project we had comments of very expirienced StarOffice supporters(from the former starnews support groups) who will not join us because the unusable newsgroups. This is an important loss for us! This problem is easyly reproduceable for everyone with a simple mail/news client. Only the CollabNet newsserver have this problem, all other mail/news gateways I know, work very well! Have a look at e.g. news.mozilla.org CU Jörg
thanks for the update, Jörg, -Louis
This works for me. I am using Mozilla and it shows threads properly.
Hi Brant If everybody use the NNTP only for reading the mails, the threading is OK, but if anyone posts a mail via NNTP, then the mail2news gateway mangles the Message-IDs. Please remember that our NNTP service is not going public yet, so only some test mails are posted via the NNTP service. CU Jörg
I don't see, that we will have a news server for OpenOffice.org's mailing lists. I would recommend to use GMANE's service. (http://www.gmane.org/)
close issue.