NEWS2MAIL(8)

NAME
news2mail - Channel script to gateway news into e-mails

SYNOPSIS
news2mail

DESCRIPTION
news2mail runs as a channel process underneath innd. It is set up as channel feed in newsfeeds, with different mailing-lists as funnel entries pointing to it (see below); news2mail expects the token of an article followed by a sequence of list names.

news2mail uses the configuration file pathetc/news2mail.cf to map mailing-list names to e-mail addresses. news2mail causes the mail transport agent (usually sendmail, as set in the mta parameter in inn.conf) to queue the messages for later delivery (to avoid DOS attacks by mass postings). You must run "sendmail -q" periodically to get the queue processed.

If the gatewaying is being set up with a software like Mailman which has the feature of pulling and posting news articles on its own, you should just rely on that feature (and grant Mailman read and post access to the newsgroup), and do not use news2mail at all. It will indeed save you the time of configuring it correctly and investigating possible circular loops or rejects.

There is also another possibility to gate a newsgroup to a mailing-list, that is making the newsgroup a moderated newsgroup, and setting the Mailman list address as the moderator address of the newsgroup in the moderators(5) configuration file, and having everything go through Mailman. In this setup, Mailman can even be used as a moderation interface.

CONFIGURATION FILE
The configuration file format is simple: comments (starting with a hash sign "#") and blank lines are ignored. All other lines have two or three fields on them. The first is the list name and is what innd uses (i.e. the site field of the entry in the newsfeeds file). The second field is the actual e-mail address to send the article to. The third field is optional: it sets the envelope-from address (for instance a list member's address; if not set, it defaults to the "news" user).

In e-mail messages, the To header field body will have the mailing-list address (i.e. the second field). Besides, news2mail strips most article header fields from the article before mailing.

In newsfeeds, the channel feed should look like:

    news2mail!:!*:Ac,Tc,Wn*:<pathbin>/news2mail

and for each mailing-list, you only have to add to newsfeeds an entry list like:

    list-big-red-ants/lists.ucsd.edu\
        :!*,rec.pets.red-ants\
        :Ap,Tm:news2mail!

Please note the use of "Ap" and the exclusion of the list owner domain to protect the list from feeding back new arrivals from the list. The site name used in the newfeeds entry for a mailing-list (above "list-big-red-ants") must be the same as the first field in an entry in news2mail.cf. For instance:

    # newsfeeds-name   list-to-address      [list-sender-address]
    list-big-red-ants  ants@lists.ucsd.edu  news+ants@news.server.org

FILES

pathbin/news2mail
    The Perl program itself used to gateway news into e-mails.

pathetc/news2mail.cf
    The configuration file which specifies the mapping to use for gatewaying.

BUGS
The news2mail program is set up as a funnelled channel in newsfeeds, implying multiple matches should be handled as one - and multiple matching funnelled feeds will result in a single call to the script. Therefore, since only one mail is sent, crossposts are not currently properly handled as for the envelope-from address (which then defaults to the "news" user).

HISTORY
news2mail was written by Brian Kantor in 1998. This man page was written by James Brister and converted to POD by Julien Elie. The third optional field in news2mail.cf was added by D. Stussy in 2008.

SEE ALSO
innd(8), newsfeeds(5).