Re: Offtopic: Google Groups users fight against spam.
On May 8, 9:20 pm, REH <spamj...@stny.rr.com> wrote:
On May 8, 12:18 pm, Jeff Schwab <j...@schwabcenter.com> wrote:
You're already accessing news groups via HTTP. Whether you
use the Google servers, or some other site, seems like a
distinction without a difference. The only down-side I see
to rolling your own is the weekend it would take to set up.
The distinction is my company's firewall only allows access to
NTTP over its officially assign port (119). Google is an HTTP
server, which my company allows over its officially assigned
port (80). The content is immaterial. Yes, if another HTTP
server served up usenet I could access it. What I cannot do is
access a usenet server outside of my company. Since there is
no longer any company site with a usenet server, I stuck with
Google. I don't want another poor-man's usenet like Google.
I'd like to be able to use a real, full-featured usenet
client.
It's probably possible (and I suspect that Jeff was suggesting
something along these lines) to set up a simple HTTP server at
your home site, which serves more or less what you want in
groups, in a much simpler format than Google, and then set up a
demon at work which downloads everything from this server,
recreating the group structure in local directories. I think
most newsreaders can still read from a local disk (as if the
local machine was a server).
If you can feed your home machine as if it were a server, this
shouldn't be too difficult---I did it once (many years back),
using email as a transfer agent. My home machine was set up as
an NTPP "server", and did maintain an image of the groups I was
interested in. In addition, it had a demon which periodically
bundled an image of the directories into an email, and sent it
to my work address. Where a .forward script detected that
particular email, and installed the files where I wanted them on
the work machine. (And it only took a couple of hours to set
this up---once I had INEWS compiled, installed, and configured
correctly on my home machine.)
I'm not sure if this is workable today. Most newsnet providers
will probably not serve you as if you were a server, and
downloading a complete image as a client may be too complicated.
--
James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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