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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.cw-email
Date:         Thu, 21 Jan 1993 10:21:00 GMT
Reply-To:     "J.F.Murphy, Univ.College, Cork, Ireland." <jfm@IRUCCVAX.UCC.IE>
              <CW-EMAIL@TECMTYVM.BITNET>
Comments:     Warning -- original Sender: tag was CBSY8001@IRUCCVAX.UCC.IE
From:         jfm@IRUCCVAX.UCC.IE
Subject:      Re: Mailing Lists from a central access point

Hi

yc@nessy.rug.ac.be wrote :

>Currently we are investigating the use of central subscription to mailinglists.

It would help if we knew what hardware and OS platforms you are using.

*IF* you are a VAX/VMS site then one option is to use the
Geoff Heuston VAXNEWS package to access Usenet News.

Another option worth looking at is the Mark London MIT PFC Bulletin package.
Robust with a nice familiar VAX MAIL look-and-feel.  With Bulletin running
on several DECNETted VAXen, the users have a sort of distributed information
system - rather like entering the VAX Mail environment and being able to
transparently read folders residing on several remote machines.
For several years my site has used bulletin - we 'feed' it about
50-ish mailing lists which can be accessed from the main vax or from
several local decentted small vaxen running Bulletin.
Moreover, if you have TCP/IP on your VAX and Usenet News on a local
Unix box then Bulletin also gives transparent access to NEWS.
Bulletin doesn't have the archiving facilities you describe - but
then, mailing list archives are usually maintained at the site where
they originate and are usually net-accessible.
Last but by no means least - Bulletin is free.

 ...
>The strategie we would like to follow is the following :
>- a central subscribe to all the lists to which a lot of people on our
>  university do a subscribe
>- Make it possible to all people to read the  mail which is received by
>  these mailing-list, discussion-list, ... (with GOPHER)
>- Make sure that the amount of data we have to keep on disk does not grow
>  out of proportion (i.e. moderate them)
>- As soon as archive files of these lists are available, to let them come over
>  and replace the incomming-mail box by this archive (which --I hope-- has been
>  moderated already)
>- Make it possible to all to browse through these archive-files (information
   which
>  is not very uptodate), but give the people the chance to be follow the
   discussion
>  and information for the mails which are send between the making of two
   archive-files.
>My questuions :
>1. is there some sofware available for easy moderation of large mailboxes which
>   belong to subscribed maillists, discussionlists, info-lists, ...
>2. is there ready-to-use software which makes it possible to :
>        * get the archives (which are often kept on the server on which
>        a maillist resides) AUTOMATICALLY, when these archives are updated
>        (i.e the contents of the list is backed up into a (moderated) file)
>        -> maybe an option used when subscribing to a list??
>        * and clean the local mailbox (incomming mail) as soon as this archive
>        file has been send and received by the local machine.
>        -> point is we do not have to poll to know if these archive files are
>           already ready or not.  This should be done automatically.
>Yves Carlier
>Software Admin
>RUG - University of Ghent -- Belgium
>e-mail : yc@nessy.rug.ac.be

Regards
jfm

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