News::Article - Object for handling Usenet articles in mail or news form.

   Copyright 1997 by Andrew Gierth <[email protected]>.
   All rights reserved.
   This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
   modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

MODULES

 News::Article
 News::AutoReply
 News::FormArticle
 News::FormReply

STATUS

 This release is considered reasonably stable, both in functionality
 and interface.

INTRODUCTION

 This module originated with the development of the software intended
 to handle newsgroup creation for the (new) mod.* Usenet hierarchy.
 The requirement to centralise, and fully automate, the process of
 group creation and the detection of defunct groups led to a large
 number of cases where the software would be required to read, parse,
 forward, reply to, mail and post articles of various forms.

 Therefore, this module allows for creating articles from scratch, or
 reading them from various data sources; various header
 manipulations, and posting via NNTP or mailing via a
 sendmail-workalike.

 Support is included for PGPMoose v1.1-compatible signatures, and
 also for control-message signatures believed to be compatible with
 current distributions of signcontrol and pgpverify.

 FormArticle is a derivative, intended for the construction of news
 articles (or mail messages) by substitutions into boilerplate text.
 AutoReply and FormReply are additional (very simple) derivatives.

REQUIREMENTS

 This probably won't work except on Unix or a very good imitation.

 Net::Domain
 Net::NNTP
 PGP::Sign

 (It would be nice to weaken these dependencies somewhat.)

 Mailing articles requires a sendmail-workalike (normally
 /usr/lib/sendmail or /usr/sbin/sendmail).

INSTALLATION

 Review the "System Dependent Configuration" section near the
 beginning of Article.pm. If it would fail to find a working sendmail
 on your system, and you care, then fix it as necessary.

 Then follow the standard installation procedure for Perl modules,
 which is to type the following commands:

       perl Makefile.PL
       make
       make install

 You'll probably need to do the last as root.  A testsuite (though not
 an extensive one yet) is supplied.

THANKS

 Thanks to Russ Allbery <[email protected]> for comment and
 significant contributions.

AUTHOR

 Andrew Gierth <[email protected]>

AVAILABILITY

 CPAN, or see http://www.erlenstar.demon.co.uk/perl

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