Mail2News Mini-Howto
 Bek Oberin [email protected]
 v1.2, November 2000

 This document describes how to set up your news server and the
 mail2news software to link mailing lists to local news groups.

 1.  Copyright and such

 The copyright of this document is retained by the author. Permission
 is granted to distribute the document by electronic means and on CDs
 provided that it is kept entirely in its original format. Permission
 is also granted to print a copy of this document for personal use.


 The republishing of this document in part or in whole without the
 permission of the copyright holder by any means other than as noted
 above is prohibited.


 2.  Introduction

 Why would you want to post mailing list traffic to local news groups?


 Should more than one user subscribe to the same mailing list, there is
 going to be traffic duplication.  By subscribing the site to a list
 (if this is allowed by the list owner) and 'gating' the email traffic
 to the local news server, it is possible to make mailing lists
 accessible to all site users, or, using the security features of
 subscription (particularly if there are a number of high traffic
 lists) can make worthwhile savings in bandwidth usage.


 Also, reading list traffic via a newsreader offers the advantages of
 threading and scoring/killfiles which tend not to be available in all
 mailreaders.  And, of course, it keeps your inbox free free for
 possibly more urgent, personal email.


 This mini-HOWTO describes setting up the 'mail2news' script to
 accomplish this.


 2.1.  Finding mail2news

 You can download the mail2news package including the script and this
 HOWTO and other documentation from


 ______________________________________________________________________
 http://www.tertius.net.au/~gossamer/code/mail2news/
 ______________________________________________________________________



 3.  Overview of the system

 It is probably easiest to understand how this system works by tracking
 a message from the mailing list to the newsgroup and then a message
 posted to the local newsgroup (and gated to the mailing list) and see
 how they are handled.



 3.1.  Mail from the mailing list

 When mail from the mailing list arrives at the local machine, procmail
 figures out what newsgroup it belongs in, and pipes the incoming
 message to mail2news.


 The mail2news script processes the message, applying news headers and
 then uses rnews or inews to post the message to the newsgroup.


 3.2.  Messages posted to the local newsgroup

 The local newsgroup is set up as a moderated group, as this allows us
 to take advantage of the email capabilities of innd. Any messages
 posted to a moderated group are not immediately submitted to the
 group. Instead, messages are emailed to the moderator of the group.


 By declaring the moderator of the local newsgroup to be mailing list
 address, all locally posted messages to the newsgroup are
 automatically mailed out to the mailing list by innd and only appear
 once they have been received back through mail2news which adds the
 necessary 'approved' line to the messages and are thus acceptable to
 innd for posting to the newsgroup.


 4.  Setting up mail2news

 Put the mail2news script in a suitable location. I favour
 /usr/local/bin, but the location is up to you.


 You will need to edit script as follows:-


 �  At the top of the script, make sure you are pointing at the local
    Perl binary.  You can probably find out where Perl is by typing it,
    /usr/bin/perl is the safest bet:


    ___________________________________________________________________
    #!/usr/bin/perl
    # point at the correct location of perl
    ___________________________________________________________________



 �  Edit the following lines to point at the posting program (I use
    rnews, inews will work too) and your news host:


    ___________________________________________________________________
    # $inews = "/usr/bin/inews";
    # $iopts = "-h -o \"mail2news gateway\"";
    $inews = "/usr/bin/rnews";
    $iopts = "";
    $postinghost = "your.news.server";   # points at your news server
    ___________________________________________________________________



 �  Make sure that the script is exectuable:


    ___________________________________________________________________
    chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/mail2news
    ___________________________________________________________________



 5.  Procmail

 The procmail config file is at  /.procmailrc.  If you don't already
 have a procmailrc file, just create one.


 Make an entry for each mailing list that is to be gated to your local
 news server.  Something like this will do the trick for most cases,
 but might fail for mail Bcc'd to the mailing list.


 For example if your mailing list is '[email protected]' and you
 want the newsgroup to be called 'lists.jokes' your entry would look
 like this:


 ______________________________________________________________________
 :0
 * [email protected]
 |/usr/local/bin/mail2news lists.jokes
 ______________________________________________________________________



 Note there's no space between the 'TO' and the list address on the
 second line.


 You need to put a blank line between the lines for each group.  Put as
 many entries as you want, using the same 3 lines for each group, but
 changing the list address and newsgroup.



 6.  Setting up the news groups and news server (innd)

 Using ctlinnd, create the newsgroups on your news server. Remember,
 these are to be local news groups, so start them with a distinctive
 name so you can filter them out from your news distributions (in your
 newsfeeds file).


 You also need to tell innd that the group is moderated (by using
 ctlinnd). Remember, innd is very sensitive to file ownership and
 permissions, so you need to interct at this level with innd as the
 news user. Indicating a moderated group is done by specifying m to the
 newgroup command.


 ______________________________________________________________________
 ctlinnd newgroup lists.jokes m
 ______________________________________________________________________



 The m tells innd that the group is moderated.

 Edit your newsfeeds file to make sure that these local groups are not
 distributed (unless you specificaly wish this to occur).


 For example, if your mailing list is called local.site.group, then you
 would probably want to add !local* to the second field of your up (and
 possibly your down) stream news sites in your newsfeeds file.


 Now, in order to ensure that user messages are sent to the list
 automatically by innd, edit /etc/news/moderators to include a line
 declaring the mailing list email address as the moderator.


 ______________________________________________________________________
 lists.jokes:[email protected]
 ______________________________________________________________________



 7.  If it doesn't work...

 If things don't work, you need to track through the path the messages
 are taking to see exactly where things are breaking down. Useful tools
 here are the mail and news logs.


 8.  The Future

 One problem with messages posted this way is they'll have a
 Newsgroups: header in them, and some other junk that the newsserver
 introduces.  This isn't a major problem, but it makes the messages
 "messy".  It'd be nice if some program could intercept them and re-
 write the headers before sending them on.

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