AWESOME!!! Thanks Kevin! Your hard work is appreciated. This will go along way towards making this hack a little bit more secure and BB friendly.

Hmmm.... it seems I am now getting an error. I'm not sure if this is related to the new attachment perms or not.

I also upgraded to the new version this morning.

Maybe I made a mistake writing the instructions. I have attached a version of gateway.php which is working for me with the attachment permissions.

Try this.

thank you Kevin ... no problems on my end

Imhotep,
ReCheck your code ... you probably made a mistake copying / pasting

Kevin, thanks, this file fixed the problem. I am usually very careful about how I copy/paste, so I am not sure if I made a mistake or not. I suppose if princeton got it working, then I probably fulbbed somewhere along the line.

thanks again

In the NNTP Gateway setting, under the "Email address domain" option, I'm not quite sure what to put there. What do you mean by Do I need to change the default value?

Also, for the "Mailing list E-mail" setting, do I put the email address of the mailing list (eg, coolgroups@yahoogroups.com) or is it the email address that will be sending messages to the mailling list (eg, me@mydomain.com). The yahoo mailing list that I want to archive only accepts emails from verified email addressess. Is that going to be a problem?

Finally, two suggestions:

1. For mailing lists, all emails will have a common word or phrase in the subject. For example, the subject of all messages for the "New DVD Releases" mailing list would look something like:

[NewDVD] Spider Man deluxe edition
RE: [NewDVD] Spider Man deluxe edition
etc...

It would be great if you could add a setting in the gateway setup that would allow the user to specify the subject phrase (eg, [NewDVD]) and then strip that from the subject text so that it doensn't show up in the title of every post. Also, even more importantly, have a check box that would allow us to only import message that has the subject phrase. This would allow us to filter out messages that are not actually mailing list messages.

2. Every mailing list message that I get has the same text in the footer. It would be great if there was a setting somehwere where I could specify this footer text (its over 13 lines!) and have it stripped before importing the message.

Thanks, this hack is really useful for me!

I've been thinking about attempting a 'killfile' feature (a common newsreader feature) which would allow the administrator to set some parameters and stop the downloading of certain posts into the forum.

I propose it works like this:

In the admin control panel, you enter the phrases (surrounded by {} ) which you would not want downloaded (similar to the censorship feature).

As each post is processed, it checks the headers, author and title of a message to see if it matches with the phrases, and if it does, discard it.

Possible uses:
You could stop a specific troll's posts from reaching your boards by putting the posters name into the killfile (although any replies by other usenet users will get through).

You could block messages originating from a specific server (for trolls that keep changing their posting name), although you risk blocking anyone else using the same server (small risk).

You could set up common 'spam' message titles to block.

Downsides:
Performance. Putting dozens of words or phrases into the killfile will slow down the processing of messages while the gateway script is being run.

Pureists. Some people using the newsgroups may consider this a form of moderation in an unmoderated group.

I'd really appreciate others users of this scripts thoughts.

Is this worth pursuing and is it the right approach?

Sounds good. Would be great if it worked the other way as well; only posts with a certain word(s) in the title would be posted to the board (eg, see my request #1 in my above post).

This could work for mailing lists, but not newsgroups. Also, each mailing list would require a different keyword to be matched in the title.

I agree about the footer. Again you would need to accomodate multiple different footers (for each mailing list, or for groups like yahoogroups which regularly change their footers from day to day). Any risk to possible violations of the terms and conditions from the list operators?

Yes, I was referring to mailings lists. Ideally, I would like to see a form for every mailing list, which would be required for any "catch phrases".

At the moment none of the posts that I get for my mailings lists are being threaded; they are all only one post deep and each reply shows up as a seperate post. It looks the "RE:" portion of the subject title might be causing problems since it can show up in several different spots in the title. For example, for the original thread, [NewDVD] Spider Man deluxe edition, the replies show up as :

RE: [NewDVD] Spider Man deluxe edition
[NewDVD] RE: Spider Man deluxe edition
RE: [NewDVD] RE: Spider Man deluxe edition

I'm guessing it's just how the various mail programs that people use handle inserting "RE". Looking at several hundred messages, the best way to determine which reply goes with which message would be to look at the title starting from the end of the message and working backwards. You don't usually see the [xxx] or the RE: part at the end of the subject. A quick browse through about 300 messages showed that if I used the last three or four words of the subject line it would have accurately put the replies with the correct original thread.