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The difference is that my scenario is two separate communities, instead of one community and one group that LOOKS like a community but is remarkably sheltered from the world.

There is room for competing communities -- happens all the time. The confusion issue comes from the fact that Marc's interface LOOKS like a community but isn't.

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The issue is, has been, and will be, the CONFUSION factor of Marc's list, not the mere presence of the content.

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OK, I really don't understand where you're coming from; Marc's list is in no way confusing to me, and I don't think there's anyone else who has been confused or misled by it. Nonetheless, lets try to fix this problem. If WWWThreads starts supporting a real, two-way mail interface, I think they'll have a great product on their hands.

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The problem with that (and the reason Marc hasn't gone into the effort to create a back-path into the BBS) is that it isn't NEARLY that simple. Many MUA's don't return proper threading info (what message they're in-reply-to, etc.) so where do you stick the reply?

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Understand that I've thought about this for a total of about three minutes, but it really doesn't strike me as rocket science. You've made the feature request that the digest include the URL of the original post. It could just as easily have a mailto: URL, either in addition or instead of the http: URL, that sends back a message to the board (or the gateway if it's separate, more on that later).

Where to put the message? Depending on the behavior of the MTA on the Gateway/Board machine, you can do it one of two ways. You need to encode the post ID number in the message, and this could be either in the Reply-To: field (or From: if you want to deal with really broken MUA's) or the Subject line. If you use Reply-To:, then you get the message sent back to something like [email protected], and the gateway posts that message in reply to message 54321. This depends on the MTA delivering everything addressed to *@empeg.comms.net to the gateway. If the MTA can't/won't/doesn't do that, you could encode the same thing in the subject line (and strip it off before posting to the board) and send everything to [email protected]. You could even put the post ID in the body of the message, but this is subject to being clobbered by dumb MUA's (and dumb MU's ).

If you're able to use Reply-To: and/or From:, simply hitting reply in the MUA will work. Subject: will as well if you encode the post ID in the outbound messages' subject line. Broken MUAs will probably have to use the mailto: URLs. (remember that most things support ?subject= syntax in the mailto: if you go that route.)

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What do you do if the user doesn't have an account on the BBS? Do you just silently drop the message? What if the user has an account but isn't permitted to post to that forum? (a la annoucements)

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The same thing that any functional MTA does with every other email message that doesn't make it to its intended destination. Bounce it with some informative error message. The one gotcha related to user accounts is that the only authentication is the From: header...That could use some additional thought.

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There are a lot of issues involved in that, many of which are outside the control of the script-writer, hence that's not a feature I'd expect any time soon.

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Actually, this is far better dealt with by the script than by an external gateway like Marc is building. If Marc is bursting digests rather than scraping the web, then he doesn't have any HTTP code at all right now. For this functionality to happen outside the script, you need to spoof forms, etc. Lots of stuff that can break with even slight changes in future versions of the script. If this is done within the script, it's much easier.

Email me if you'd like to continue this discussion further: n6mod at milewski dot org

-Zandr
Mk.I #150
Mk.II #39