Usenet news and mailing lists constantly remind us of each other. And the parallels are so strong that many mailing lists are gatewayed two-way with corresponding Usenet newsgroups, in the bit hierarchy which maps onto the old BITNET, and elsewhere.
There are probably ten different situations where a mailing list is better, and ten others where the newsgroup approach works better. The point to recognise is that the system administrator needs a choice of gatewaying one with the other, whenever tradeoffs justify it. Instead of getting into the tradeoffs themselves, this chapter will then focus on the mechanisms of gatewaying the two worlds.
One clear and recurring use we find for this gatewaying is for mailing lists which are of general use to many employees in a corporate network. For instance, in stockbroking company, many employees may like to subscribe to a business news mailing list. If each employee had to subscribe to the mailing list independently, it would waste mail spool area and perhaps bandwidth. In such situations, we receive the mailing list into an internal newsgroup, so that individual mailboxes are not overloaded. Everyone can then read the newsgroup, and messages are also archived till expired.
In CNews, this is trivially done by adding one line to the sys file, defining a new outgoing feed listing all the relevant groups and distributions, and specifying the commandline to be executed which is supposed to send out the outgoing message to that ``feed.'' This command, in our case, should be a mail-sending program, e.g. /bin/mail user@somewhere.com. This is often adequate to get the job done. We are sure almost every Usenet news software system will have an equally easy way of piping the feed of a newsgroup to an email address.
With our Usenet software sources has been integrated a set of scripts which we have been using for at least five years internally. This set of scripts is called mail2news. It contains one shellscript called mail2news, which takes an email message from stdin, processes it, and feeds the processed version to inews, the stdin-based news article injection utility of C-News. The inews utility accepts a new article post in its stdin and queues it for digestion by newsrun whenever it runs next.
To use mail2news, we assume you are using Sendmail to process incoming email. Our instructions can easily be modified to adapt to any Mail Transport Agent (MTA) of your choice. You will have to configure Sendmail or any other MTA to redirect incoming mails for the gateway to a program called m2nmailer, a Perlscript which accepts the incoming message in its standard input and a list of newsgroup names, space separated, on its command line. Sendmail can be easily configured to trigger m2nmailer this way by defining a new mailer in sendmail.cf, and directing all incoming emails meant for the Usenet news system to this mailer. Once you set up the appropriate rulesets for Sendmail, it automatically triggers m2nmailer each time an incoming email comes for the mail2news gateway.
The precise configuration changes to Sendmail have already been specified in the chapter titled ``Setting up C-News + NNTPd.''
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