What would be easier to get accomplished would be doing something like what Microsoft did, which would be to create an entire cobalt.* hierarchy, instead of using comp.*, rec.*, or any of the other big 8. If they created their own hierarchy, they might have to establish their own NNTP peers to propogate the news articles, but this should still result in less egress traffic than sending a copy of each post to everyone who's subscribed to the list.
The problem with news to mail gateways is that you often lose the anti-spam protection that you can get out of the mailing list.....ie. since people are allowed to post via the news server, they are not subscribed to the email list, so the email list can not be setup to restrict posts to registered users. The email list would have to be completely open, such that anyone can post to the list, in order for the posts to be accepted from the news gateway.
Otherwise, setting up INN or some other news server should be easy enough. I'm willing to offer space on my news server, but since I'm about to change Internet feeds for my news server, it'll probably be the end of September before I can offer reliable service from the machine. Anyone else got a news server they'll volunteer?
At 10:47 AM 8/11/00 -0700, you wrote:
The mailing list software that the lists run on (mailman) has support for mail-news and news-mail gatewaying. If someone on this list were to set up a server with a newsgroup and take care of all administrative issues, I'd be happy to turn on the gateway code in the mailing list to mirror things back and forth. Just let me know the name of the server and the name of the usenet group you set up. I'd like to set this up for the developers list as well, perhaps comp.cobalt.users and comp.cobalt.developers?