Ubuntu Manpage: mailpost - Feed an e-mail message into a newsgroup

NAME

       mailpost - Feed an e-mail message into a newsgroup

SYNOPSIS

       mailpost [-hn] [-a addr] [-b database] [-c wait-time] [-d distribution] [-f addr] [-m mailing-list] [-o
       output-command] [-p port] [-r addr] [-t tempdir] [-x header[:header...]] [-z header[:header...]]
       newsgroups

DESCRIPTION

The mailpost program reads a properly formatted e-mail message from stdin and feeds it to inews for
posting to a news server. newsgroups is a whitespace-separated list of group names to which to post the
article (at least one newsgroup must be specified).

Before feeding the article to inews, it checks that the article has not been seen before, and it changes
some header fields (cleans up some address headers, removes a few ones like X-Complaints-To: and
X-Trace:, and puts "X-" in front of unknown header fields). The Received: and *-To: header fields are
also altered to prevent spamming the gateway (the name of the news server or the domain name from
inn.conf are removed).

If the article has been seen before (mailpost records the message-ID of each article it handles), then
the article will be dropped with a non-zero error status. Other errors will cause the article to be
mailed to the newsmaster (selected at configure time and defaulting to "usenet").

Normally, mailpost is run by sendmail(8) via an alias entry:

local-mail-wreck-bikes: "|<pathbin in inn.conf>/mailpost
-b /var/tmp -t /var/tmp -d local local.mail.rec.bicycles.racing"

The -b and -t flags are useful to change the directories used by mailpost by default. As a matter of
fact, though it is recommended to run mailpost as the news user, it is as often as not run as another
user, for instance the mail user. Therefore, you should make sure to create and set to be writable by
the user that mailpost runs as the directories where to put the database and the temporary files.

Instead of /var/tmp, the mail spool directory can be specified, or any other directory where the mailpost
process has write access.

OPTIONS

-a addr
If the -a flag is used, the value given is added to the article as an Approved: header.

-b database
If the -b flag is used, then it defines the location of the persistent database used to store the
message-IDs of articles sent on. This is to prevent articles looping around if a news-to-mail
gateway sends them back here. This option may be required if the mailpost process does not have
write access to the news database directory. The default value is pathdb as set in inn.conf.

-c wait-time
The -c flag indicates a length of time to sleep before posting. If duplicate messages are received
in this interval (by any instance of mailpost using the same database), the article is only posted
once, but with Newsgroups: header modified to crosspost the article to all indicated groups. The
units for wait-time are seconds; a reasonable value may be anywhere from tens to hundreds of seconds,
or even higher, depending on how long mail can be delayed on its way to your system.

-d distribution
If the -d flag is used, the value given is added to the article as a Distribution: header.

-f addr
The -f flag is a synonym for the -r flag.

-h Print usage information and exit.

-m mailing-list
If the -m flag is used, the value given is added to the article in a Mailing-List: header, if such a
header doesn't already exist.

-n If the -n flag is used, neither an article is posted nor a mail is sent in case an error occurs.
Everything is written to the standard output.

-o output-command
Specifies the program to which the resulting article processed by mailpost should be sent. For
debugging purpose, "-o cat" can be used. The default value is "inews -S -h".

-p port
Specifies the port on which nnrpd is listening, used for article posting. If given, -p is passed
along to inews.

-r addr
A heuristic is used to determine a reasonable value for the Path: header. The -r flag indicates what
to use if no other value can be determined.

-t tempdir
If the -t flag is used, then it defines the location of the directory to use to temporarily store
error messages that are sent to the newsmaster. This option may be required if the default value
refers to a path that does not exist or the mailpost process does not have write access to. Two
paths are tried by default: pathtmp as set in inn.conf, and then /var/tmp if pathtmp is not
writable.

-x header[:header...]
A colon-separated list of additional header fields which should be treated as known header fields;
these header fields will be passed through to inews without having "X-" prepended.

Known header fields are:

Archive
Archived-At
Comments
Content-*
Date
Distribution
From
Injection-Date
Keywords
Mailing-List
Message-ID
MIME-*
Organization
References
Return-Path
Sender
Subject
Summary

-z header[:header...]
A colon-separated list of additional header fields which should be removed.

Removed header fields are:

X-Trace
X-Complaints-To

FILES

       pathbin/mailpost
           The Perl script itself used to feed an e-mail message to a newsgroup.

       pathdb/mailpost-msgid.dir and pathdb/mailpost-msgid.pag
           The default database files which record previously seen message-IDs.

HISTORY