usefor-article-06 November 2001

8.8.3.  Example

   To illustrate the type of precautions that should be taken against
   loops, here is an example of the measures taken by one particular
   combination of mail-to-news and news-to-mail gateways at Stanford
   University designed to handle bidirectional gatewaying between
   mailing lists and unmoderated groups.

   1. The news-to-mail gateway preserves the message identifier of the
      news article in the generated mail message. The mail-to-news
      gateway likewise preserves the mail message identifier provided
      that it is syntactically valid for Netnews.  This allows the news
      system's built-in suppression of duplicates to serve as the first
      line of defense against loops.

   2. The news-to-mail gateway adds an X-Gateway header to all messages
      it generates. The mail-to-news gateway discards any incoming
      messages containing this header. This is robust against mailing
      list managers that replace the message identifier, and against any
      number of mail hops, provided that the other message headers are
      preserved.

   3. The mail-to-news gateway inserts the host name from which it
      received the mail message in the pre-injection region of the Path
      (5.6.3).  The news-to-mail gateway refuses to gateway any message
      that contains the list server name in the pre-injection region of
      its Path header. This is robust against any amount of munging of
      the message headers by the mailing list, provided that the mail
      only goes through one hop.

   4. The mail-to-news gateway is designed never to generate bounces to
      the envelope sender. Instead, articles that are rejected by the
      news server (for reasons not warranting silent discarding of the
      message) result in a bounce message sent to an errors address
      known not to forward to any mailing lists, so that they can be
      handled by the news administrators.

   These precautions have proven effective in practice at preventing
   loops for this particular application (bidirectional gatewaying
   between mailing lists and locally distributed newsgroups where both
   gateways can be designed together). General gatewaying to world-wide
   newsgroups poses additional difficulties; one must be very wary of
   strange configurations, such as a newsgroup gated to a mailing list
   which is in turn gated to a different newsgroup.