Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!sun-barr!newstop!texsun!texsun.Central.Sun.COM!jthomp
From: jthomp@texsun.Central.Sun.COM (Jim Thompson )
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Mail -> News gateway
Message-ID: <1914@texsun.Central.Sun.COM>
Date: 2 Dec 89 10:47:19 GMT
References: <476@jwt.UUCP>
Sender: news@texsun.Central.Sun.COM
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.  Mt. View, Ca.
Lines: 47

In article <476@jwt.UUCP> john@jwt.UUCP (John Temples) writes:
>
>I'd like to be able to route incoming mail from a mailing list into a local
>newsgroup.  Is there software available to do this?  I tried using
>'deliver' to do this, by grepping the "Subject:" and "Reply-To:"
>headers from the mail message, adding "Newsgroups:" and
>"Distribution:", and feeding the result into inews -h.  This works, but
>has a couple of problems: my .signature gets appended to all of the
>articles, and when Rnmail is invoked via "R" from rn, it ignores the
>"Reply-To" header and sends the mail back to me.  Any suggestions?

Two suggestions:

1) Use the software written by either Erik Fair or Rich $alz
that does this.  Erik wrote it for the 'inet' group gateway
he runs.  Rich rewrote much of Erik's work in 'C'.

2) Do what I do and hack 'recnews' enough that it
gets the Reply-To, Path, and References headers right

Combine this with a custom (sendmail) mailer on the gateway machine
that recognizes the incomming group names and calls the above recnews
with appropriate args.  (After munging the From: line into something
reasonable..)

I like the 2nd approach because it eliminates keeping 'both' 
sets of aliases up-to-date.  I use a simple 'news.group-name'
pattern in the bottom of ruleset 0.  (i.e. the prepended 'news.'
tells sendmail that "this is a newsgroup..")  You can even send to
multiple groups (cross-posting) with this method.

I do like some of the methodology in R$'s stuff, like the ability
to do really evil things like say "this user said 'want' in the
subject line, but posted to a 'forsale' group, so move it to 'foo.wanted'.
It also has the ability to filter 'please add me to this list' out
of the incomming stream.  (Oh yea, both Erik's and R$'s work will
post to multiple newsgroups as well.  I didn't mean to imply that
my method was better, just more convienent for me.)

Jim
--


Jim Thompson - Network Engineering - Sun Microsystems -	jthomp@central.sun.com
Member of the Fatalistic International Society for Hedonistic Youth (FISHY)
"I woudn't recommend sex, drugs, or unix for everyone, but they work for me."
					- Me (paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson)