Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!rex!ginosko!uunet!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!sloane
From: SLOANE@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Bob Sloane)
Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news
Subject: Re: help with news
Message-ID: <10025@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Date: 28 Aug 89 17:18:25 GMT
References: <ANU-NEWS%89082516351616@NDSUVM1>
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services
Lines: 46

In article <ANU-NEWS%89082516351616@NDSUVM1>,
 "LARRY MICHALEWICZ...VAX OPERATOR" <LARRY@UNTVAX.BITNET> writes:
> What is the proper way to put mailed messages into anu
> also what is the proper way to send locally posted messages to BITNET
> mailinglists.

The answer to this depends on whether the mailed messages were intended as
news articles to begin with or not.  I assume what you would like to do is
gateway some mailing lists into News.  If this is the case, I have some
software that will pre-process mail to/from a bitnet mailing list. It was
written to handle the ANU-NEWS mailing list/news.software.anu-news group
interface, and seems to be working fairly well so far.  I can post it if
anyone else is interested.

In general, you should use the ADD FILE command to add news articles that were
mailed to you. The program I wrote just filters out unwanted header lines
(like Received:) and adds a Newsgroups: line, and separates the articles with
#!rnews lines.  The output file of the program is then used as the input file
on a News ADD FILE command.  You could just use ADD FILE/DEFNEWSGROUP command
and get much the same results.

Sending articles to mailing lists is a little more complicated.  The problem
is getting the header lines actually intrepreted as headers by the receiving
system.  I solved this problem by "mailing" the articles using the JNET "SEND"
command to send the files directly to the mailer on BITNET.  If you are not on
BITNET or are not using the Joiner Assoc. software, this method won't work for
you. Basically, I set up a dummy system called anu-news using a NEWS.SYS file
entry like:

anu-news:world,na,usa,news.software.anu-news:\
  B:news_manager_dev:[MAIL_ANU-NEWS]NEWS.BATCH^B

That routed all of the articles posted to the newsgroup to a file in RFC1036
batch format.  Then I wrote a program that would read this file and send each
article to the mailing list using the SEND/FILE command from the JNET package.
The program sets up the mail headers so that the original poster of the
article is in the From: and Reply-To: lines. Again, you must have the JNET
package for this to work.

If anyone is interested in a copy of either or both of these programs, let me
know. If there is enough interest, I will post them.
+-------------------+-------------------------------------+------------------+
|  Bob Sloane        \Internet: SLOANE@KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU/Anything I said is |
|  Computer Center    \ BITNET: SLOANE@UKANVAX.BITNET   / my opinion, not my |
|  University of Kansas\  AT&T: (913) 864-0444         /  employer's.        |
+-----------------------+-----------------------------+----------------------+