Mail2News Gateway
Introduction
As its name suggests, a Mail2News Gateway provides a means to send a standard Email and have it posted to a newsgroup. The Gateway receives incoming Emails, modifies them slightly to a News format and then posts them.
Getting Started
The simplest way to use the Gateway is to just send an Email using a format like this:
To: mail2news@m2n.mixmin.net
Subject: Anything you like
From: Your Name/Email
Newsgroups:alt.test
Other headers can be included at your discretion, a common example being:
X-No-Archive: Yes
This instructs news archives not to store the message.
Alternate Usage
In some instances it may not be possible to insert a Newsgroups header into a message. This may be because the client application doesn't support custom headers or perhaps that the user doesn't know how to edit them. In these instance the following method may provide an alternative.
To: mail2news-yyyymmdd-news.group@m2n.mixmin.net
Where:
yyyymmdd is today's date, such as 20080318 for 18th March 2008.
news.group is the Usenet group that the message is destined for.
Example
To send a message to a group called alt.test on the date given above:
To: mail2news-20080318-alt.test@m2n.mixmin.net
Multiple groups can be specified up to a maximum of three by seperating them with a equals sign:
To: mail2news-20080318-alt.test=alt.testing.testing@m2n.mixmin.net
Date Validation
The purpose of the date component is to prevent serious abuse of Usenet by means of automated spamming. As the date only remains valid for a period of 24 hours, by the time spammers harvest it, it is no longer accepted by the Gateway.
Email Address Obfuscation
One issue with the above message format is the resulting spam that's likely to be directed at your Email address. This is caused by spammers using applications called Harvesters to collect Email addresses from Usenet. To overcome this problem, the Mail2News Gateway provides a means to munge the Email address of the sender.:
To: mail2news_nospam@m2n.mixmin.net
To: mail2news_nospam-yyyymmdd-news.group@m2n.mixmin.net
This will completely remove the senders address from the From header and will instead put it in a new header using the following format:
Author-Supplied-Address: user <at> domain <dot> com
This has the benefit of protecting the real address from harvesters, but the downside that it relies on some knowledge on the behalf of the recipient to discover the real address in the message headers if they want to reply to it.
Outbound News Server
By default the Mail2News Gateway relies on an operator configured list of news servers to feed each message to. In rare instances a poster may prefer to elect a specific server in order to override the default. This can be done by adding the following header:
X-Newsserver: news.server.address
Only a single server can be specified in this manner and the message will be delivered using a 'post' method rather than 'ihave'.
Crossposting
Crossposting is limited on this server to a maximum of three groups.
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