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Re: [Pan-users] posting via gmane??
From: |
Duncan |
Subject: |
Re: [Pan-users] posting via gmane?? |
Date: |
Thu, 25 Sep 2014 03:43:41 +0000 (UTC) |
User-agent: |
Pan/0.140 (Chocolate Salty Balls; GIT d447f7c /m/p/portage/src/egit-src/pan2) |
Beartooth posted on Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:35:52 +0000 as excerpted:
> Like others here, I subscribe to lists and set them immediately to
> nomail, because I try never to look at one in email if I can get it via
> Gmane. (I also happen to hate webmail with the purplest of passions,
> btw; I know some form of it exists with a Gmane connection, and I have
> to forgive Lars for that, but wild horses that try to drag me there will
> become instant horsemeat.)
AFAIK, gmane has a web interface to its archive, that has a reply option
as well, but I wouldn't link that with webmail. I'd consider it more
what I just said, a web interface to an archive, that happens to be of
mailing lists, but I doubt anyone familiar with gmane would argue that it
encourages or emphasizes the /email/ aspect of that at all; rather to the
contrary, it provides both a web interface and a news interface as
/alternatives/ to the normal email interface to mailing lists.
Of course I'm assuming you don't have information about some gmane-
related webmail project of which I'm unaware...
> Pan/Gmane is great for *reading* lists gatewayed from email; but
> I get mixed results with *postings* and attempts to post. Sometimes they
> go through. Sometimes I get an automated note from Gmane, requiring me
> to prove my humanity by replying, and then they go through. And
> sometimes they seem just to fall into some vast empty cyberspace.
>
> Is this a Pan matter, or a Gmane matter, or something I have to
> take up with listowners? (I favor the last, because Istr getting across
> some listowner who couldn't be bothered, once long ago and far away.)
I believe you're conflating two and possibly three different issues, tho
you're certainly not alone in your confusion as I've seen others confused
over the exact same thing.
Viewed from a high level, without the minutia of detail, the first thing
to realize about gmane replies is that gmane simply acts as a relay --
basically, it converts your news reply back into email and sends it to
the list-serv as if it was simply an email relay, thus gating the reply
back to mail, reversing the process of gating the mail it gets from the
lists to news. Once it hands off to the list-serv, gmane's reply relay
job is done and it's up to the list-serv to process the mail using list-
serv rules. Assuming the list-serve mails out the message, gmane treats
the message just like any other once it receives it as a message from the
list. At that point, it's just another message from the list and gmane
doesn't care that the message was actually relayed thru gmane before it
hit the list-serv.
This reply-relay by definition adds an additional hop to the chain that
the message has to pass in ordered to get sent out on the list, and that
additional hop by definition must increase the complexity and fragility
of the process as a whole, as opposed to simply sending the mail
directly. That bit is only gmane's fault to the extent that it provides
the service at all, as there's no way to provide that service /without/
adding that extra hop and consequent additional places for something to
go wrong.
Once you have that concept in mind, it's easier to understand the details.
The second thing to keep in mind, still high level but down the level
scale slightly from the above, tho the discussion below gets a bit
detailed, is that while a message sent directly to a mailing list has one
level of authentication to go thru, a message sent via gmane has two. If
either one fails, the message doesn't get posted, to the list or to gmane,
since the only way messages get posted to gmane is if they are received
from the list-serv via gmane's subscription.
Gmane level authentication is the first one and is one-time (assuming you
reply, authenticating yourself) per list/group. Once you reply to the
gmane authentication prompt for that group/list, gmane will automatically
forward all future replies from you via gmane to that list[1].
The idea here is to ensure that users are using real email addresses that
they can actually receive mail on, and also that they actually intend to
post to that list (see the next paragraphs). Technically, gmane wouldn't
/have/ to do this, but it's in the interest of all gmane users that it
does, since it cuts down on spammers via gmane quite a bit as they have
to reply to at least one message on the address they use, and without
that, most list admins would surely blacklist gmane replies entirely. So
while it's a small hassle, it's also critical to being able to use gmane
for replies /at/ /all/.
One possible source of confusion here is on cross-posted messages.
Keeping in mind that the list2news correspondence and gating isn't
perfect, if gmane receives a cross-posted message it will attempt to
forward it to all the corresponding lists. But what happens if you're a
regular on one such list and have thus long ago replied to the gmane
authentication challenge for that list, but have never confirmed to gmane
that you want to send messages to the other list(s) in the cross-post?
As might be predicted, you get the gmane email asking if you want to post
to the list you've not yet confirmed. However, gmane forwards your mail
to the one you're a regular on right away, as you long ago confirmed it.
But this is something the gmane confirmation email doesn't make quite
clear, because it was designed with single-list posts in mind, not cross-
posting. Thus the confusion.
Making this case a bit worse for pan users is the fact that pan doesn't
challenge cross-posts unless you're posting to more than I think three
lists (or five? IDR) at once. It does list the other groups in the
newsgroups line in the posting dialog, but if you're like me, most of the
time you don't notice that and only realize the message was crossposted
if you get that email from gmane asking for confirmation to post to a
list you didn't even know you were posting to in the first place, because
you didn't notice the newsgroups line.
Side note: I really wish this was a pan option. I want pan to warn
loudly for ANY cross-posting, tho it should allow me to go ahead and do
it anyway if it's not TOO many lists.
What I've taken to doing here in most cases is simply ignoring the gmane
confirmation emails for lists I didn't intend to post the reply to in the
first place. I have no reason to want my replies on some ubuntu or
fedora list, just because someone decided to crosspost the original
message to it as well as to the pan or kde or whatever list I saw the
message on and replied from, so I just let the gmane confirmations that
would allow me to post to that list timeout, and my replies presumably
never see that list as a result.
The second level of authentication is that of the list-serv itself. Gmane
has nothing at all to do with this; gmane simply forwards the message,
and the list-serv does with it whatever the list-serv is configured to
do, which in many cases is to confirm posts from non-subscribers (open
list with confirmation), but it can also simply refuse them (closed list,
must be a subscriber to post, period), or send them to a human moderator
to confirm (moderated open list, non-subscriber posts may be delayed in
the moderator queue for some time but if on topic should eventually show
up), or post them automatically (fully open list, no confirmation, not
common due to spam, but still seen on lists such as those hosted by
vger.kernel.org, which has other strong anti-spam measures including HTML
and unrecognized binary-attachment type filters).
Again, unless the list-serv has a rule blacklisting posts relayed thru
gmane (up to the admin, some do, I guess), the processing here is exactly
the same whether you post directly to the list via email, or whether you
post thru gmane.
If you make sure you're a list subscriber (with the same address as you
use on gmane, obviously important, but something easy to lose track of if
you have multiple email addresses) and set nomail mode, as you mentioned
above, in theory, the list-serv authentication level won't be a problem,
since you're a subscriber and the rules for non-subscribers shouldn't
apply at all. The single exception is if the list-serv blacklists gmane
relayed posts even for subscribers. Regardless, at this level it's 100%
the list-serv admin's policy at play, out of gmane's control entirely[2].
But there remains some confusion here, due to the *TWO* levels of
authentication when replying thru gmane, the gmane human-verification
level, and the list's own level, entirely out of gmane's control. If
people don't realize that and conflate the two, it becomes very confusing
indeed.
Then once gmane forwards the message and the list-serv posts it, gmane
gets it as it it would any other message from that list and like any
other subscriber to that list would get it. Occasionally, a message will
(apparently) be posted to the list and I'll see the replies to it, but
the message itself either never appears on gmane, or gets posted on gmane
later, after the replies to it have already appeared!
There isn't much that can be done about that. It's simply the
reliability of the email system and of the gmane processing of it, at
this stage. Hardware does break; software does have bugs. Live does go
on, just as it would if you had subscribed to the list directly and you
ended up seeing replies to a message before the message itself came in.
That too happens occasionally so it's not just gmane, altho admittedly
the gmane list2news gating process adds additional complexity and more
software and hardware that can break.
> And do my drafts automatically get preserved somewhere? Istr also that
> at one time they didn't, alas!
Yes, messages in-progress do get auto-saved now, as do sent messages.
In the compose window, if you hit the open-draft button (or use the open-
draft file-menu function or hit the corresponding hotkey), you should see
an "autosave" file, the /autosave/ of the current message in progress.
If you use the save-draft function, you can of course save to that file
manually, or to another filename, if you like, which will then allow you
to load it from open-draft as well.
However, due to the way autosave works and the fact that you only get the
open draft option once you're composing a message, which by that point
has already overwritten the previous autosave, if you want to retrieve a
message you were composing at the time of a crash, you have to do a
little file-rename dance to get to the previous autosave before it's
overwritten by a new one when the compose window is opened in ordered to
get to the open draft functionality.
Since many of my replies are long and involved, sometimes taking hours to
write as I check references and write and rewrite paragraphs until I'm
happy enough with things to hit send, I have a bit of experience with
retrieving half-written posts from drafts. =:^\
Here's what I do. Before opening pan's compose window after a crash, I
browse to the drafts directory under the pan home dir
(so ~/.pan2/article-drafts , by default). Once there, I find the autosave
file and rename it to something else, generally reflecting whatever topic
I was discussing at the time. Then in ordered to open the compose window
I act as if I was going to compose a new message, only once the compose
window is open, I can select open draft, and instead of opening the
autosave (which will at this point be the new, now blank, message), I can
select and open the renamed file instead, thus retrieving my half-written
message and hopefully allowing me to finish and send without further
crashes.
As for sent messages, that functionality is there but still a bit buggy.
There's a sent-messages folder (pseudo-group) under local folders. This
is where you'll find your sent messages. However, while messages sent
during a particular pan session do appear here, they don't appear as
cached until the next session. And since there's no real newsgroup
corresponding to this pseudo-group, attempting to read the message won't
cache it, since there's not a real server to download it from. So to
actually view the full message, you first have to quit and restart pan,
which will cause it to check which messages are cached and thus display
the messages from the last session as now cached. You can then read them
as you normally would.
The other quirk with sent messages is that since it's a pseudo-group not
attached to a real news server, the usual method pan uses to track which
messages are read and which are unread, fails. Every time pan restarts,
all messages in the sent folder again appear as unread. You can read
messages in sent and they'll show as read for that session, but because
pan has no way to save that information, once you restart pan, all
messages in the sent folder again appear as unread.
Tho viewed in another way, this bug could be considered a feature, since
unless you've read sent messages in a particular session and assuming you
haven't deleted any of them, you effectively have a running count of the
number of messages you've posted since pan started using the sent-
messages folder. =:^)
---
[1] Assuming that group/list isn't marked as one-way, like many announce
groups are. Pan's announce list for example, is normally only used to
announce new pan versions, and only a couple pan devs (Petr Kovar, and
possibly KHaley and Heinrich Mueller) have access to post to it. I'm not
sure it's on gmane as I want direct email from it and have thus
subscribed directly, but if it is, it'd be marked one-way, since ordinary
users aren't /supposed/ to be able to post to it.
[2] Well, if gmane were to kill its authentication level, as pointed out
above, most list-admins would likely blacklist gmane entirely, so gmane
can and does do something to prevent that and help admins to look
favorably on it, but a list policy is a list policy, out of the control
of gmane other than the fact that gmane tries to avoid being blacklisted
as an abused relay.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman