I am wondering whether it would be feasible to read Usenet text groups
using the IMAP protocol. Not only email clients tend to be better
maintained than News clients nowadays, IMAP would also support
server-side read status, and thus avoid the problem of syncing newsrc
between different machines.

Cyrus seems to have the capability of doing so:
<http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/cyrus-imapd/doc/
install-netnews.html>

> Cyrus has the ability to export Usenet via IMAP and/or export shared
> IMAP mailboxes via NNTP. This is made possible by a new NNTP daemon
> which is included with Cyrus.

But are there any publicly available Usenet providers with that kind of
service set up?

For your reference, records indicate that
"Iiro Laiho" <news@iirolaiho.net> wrote:

> Cyrus seems to have the capability of doing so:
> <http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/cyrus-imapd/doc/
> install-netnews.html>

That documentation is nearly 20 years old. The most recent page I could
find is still 5 years old:
<https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/reference/admin/nntp.html>

> But are there any publicly available Usenet providers with that kind of
> service set up?

None that I know of, and I wouldn’t expect any large NNTP provider to
maintain such a gateway. I do like the idea, though, and I’ve considered
turning my Usenet reader into that sort of thing (though maybe just
working with a user’s local mail spool). Otherwise, I could see dropping
Cyrus on a Raspberry Pi or small cloud server and giving it a try. I’d
be interested in hearing of other NNTP-to-IMAP solutions, too.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly

Hi all,

>> I am wondering whether it would be feasible to read Usenet text
>> groups using the IMAP protocol. Not only email clients tend to be
>> better maintained than News clients nowadays, IMAP would also
>> support server-side read status, and thus avoid the problem of
>> syncing newsrc between different machines.[...]
> I could see dropping
> Cyrus on a Raspberry Pi or small cloud server and giving it a try. I’d
> be interested in hearing of other NNTP-to-IMAP solutions, too.

In case it could help to achieve that, for those running the news server
INN, there is a feeding program called "imapfeed" that can serve as a
NNTP-to-IMAP gateway.

I have never had the chance to test it, and does not know whether it
still works fine with current IMAP servers, but of course I would be
glad to hear successful use of it; and if it does not work, try to have
a look at what is going wrong.

https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/docs/innfeed.html

"As an alternative to using NNTP, INN may also be fed to an IMAP server.
This is done by using an executable called imapfeed, which is identical
to innfeed except for the delivery process. The new version has two
types of connections: an LMTP connection to deliver regular messages and
an IMAP connection to handle control messages."

And from INSTALL:

"The feed entry for this is as follows:

imapfeed!\
:!*\
:Tc,Wnm*,S16384:<pathbin in inn.conf>/imapfeed

And set up entries for each remote site like:

remote.example.com/news.example.com\
:<newsgroups>\
:Tm:imapfeed!
"

--
Julien ÉLIE

« Je connais des sourds qui s'entendent très bien ! » (Philippe Geluck)

Le 30/05/2021 à 10:29, Julien ÉLIE a écrit :

> "As an alternative to using NNTP, INN may also be fed to an IMAP server.

is it the same as the mailman gateway? I used it some years ago

jdd
>

--
http://dodin.org

Hi jdd,

>> "As an alternative to using NNTP, INN may also be fed to an IMAP server.
>
> is it the same as the mailman gateway? I used it some years ago

I've not run a mailman gateway either, but I do not think it uses IMAP.

Just a standard news2mail call in INN to send articles to a mailing-list
address run by mailman
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/docs/news2mail.html

or let mailman regularly connect to your news server to retrieve new
articles (gate_news):
https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/commands/docs/gatenews.html

Gérald will certainly tell us more as for how he once set up grisbi.*
gatewaying :-)

--
Julien ÉLIE

« Un dictionnaire est comme une montre ; il vaut mieux en avoir un que
pas du tout, mais le meilleur n'est jamais tout à fait exact. »
(Georges-Bernard Shaw)

Le 30/05/2021 à 11:26, Julien ÉLIE a écrit :
> Hi jdd,
>
>>> "As an alternative to using NNTP, INN may also be fed to an IMAP server.
>>
>> is it the same as the mailman gateway? I used it some years ago
>
> I've not run a mailman gateway either, but I do not think it uses IMAP.
>
> Just a standard news2mail call in INN to send articles to a mailing-list
> address run by mailman
> https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/inn/docs/news2mail.html
>
> or let mailman regularly connect to your news server to retrieve new
> articles (gate_news):
>
> https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/commands/docs/gatenews.html
>
> Gérald will certainly tell us more as for how he once set up grisbi.*
> gatewaying :-)
>
yes, but mailma allow imap as any mail, but probably overkill :-(

jdd

--
http://dodin.org

On 5/30/21 2:43 AM, jdd wrote:
> is it the same as the mailman gateway? I used it some years ago

I know that news (NNTP) support that Mailman (as in the mailing list
manager) is specifically a single newsgroup.

I would hope that imapfeed can support multiple newsgroups as different
IMAP folders. But I don't know.

There's also the fact that it would remove Mailman from the mix.

--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

In news.software.nntp Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> wrote:

> I would hope that imapfeed can support multiple newsgroups as different
> IMAP folders. But I don't know.

I was going to chime in earlier with this but decided I forgot more than I
remember but we (ripco.com) played around with this years ago (15~20?) and
decided it wasn't worth pursuing (news to imap).

I'm pretty sure after all the testing the conclusion was if you had 1 user
with 1 email account who wanted 1 news group fed into their mail, it was
fine. But rapidly fell apart for anything else.

If you wanted them to post articles, you would need some kind of mail2news
program (common in the early 2000's) and unless they cleaned up themselves
by deleting articles in the mail, there is no "expire".

I mean back then was a different world with 5-6 articles every second coming
in a full big-8 (used to be 7) plus alt verses today's one article every 5
or 6 seconds. Again disks were smaller, slower cpu's and all that factoring
in but it would of still ended up being quite messy.

I'm also sure you could of done multiple groups but it would require
something on the mail end to create individual folders via a filter to chop
things up. Even the basic webmail programs like Squirrelmail can do that but
if there are several hundred articles to process, since the filters only
come into play when the user logs in, it can create quite a delay when first
opened.

This is one of those things that look better on paper than actually putting
into practice. Too many drawbacks was the final conclusion from what I
remember. Seemed to be more of a novelty item to impress your freinds with
rather than being practical.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com