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