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Re: How to forward an email message to a newsgroup?

1996-03-12 08:59:12
I am trying to use procmail to forward an email message to a news
group.  How do I do that?  Thanks a million!

You need a mail-news gateway, usually a piece of software which sits on
an alias and then does a "inews" on the article.  Procmail can do this,
but there are already several mail-news gateway packages that it might
be easier to use one of them.

If you would rather use procmail, then you must be sure that the news
headers are set appropriately.  

For example:

* Are the contents of the "Distribution:", "Newsgroups:", etc. fields
  correct?

* Do you wish "world" distribution by default, or "local", or what.

* Does the article name newsgroups not in your local system
  distribution?  If so, do you wish to publish an article which cannot
  later be read by any of your users?

* Is the "From:" or "Sender:" field correct, or will you allow anonymous
  submissions?   Some sites do not allow anonymous submissions.

* Did the message come from the newsgroup in the first place?  It would
  be a Bad Thing to cause a mail to news loop.

Write recipes to check for the lack of the appropriate header, and
reject news submissions which do not meet the criteria for your
list/newsgroup.  

Articles which pass muster can then be forwarded to your system's news
article insertion program (typically /usr/lib/news/inews).

As I said, it's probably easier to cull the standard archives for an
existing mail-news gateway program.  Even if you want to use procmail,
it would be a good idea to use an existing algorithm.

Alan

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