news2mail - Channel script to gateway news into e-mails
news2mail
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.
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 [email protected] [email protected]
-
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.
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).
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.
innd(8),
newsfeeds(5).