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] [-x 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 headers (cleans up some address headers, removes X-Trace: and X-Complaints-To:, and puts "X-" in
       front of unknown headers).

       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 -d local local.mail.rec.bicycles.racing"

       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 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 temporary directory. The default value is pathtmp 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.

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

Known headers are:

Approved
Content-*
Date
Distribution
From
Mailing-List
Message-ID
MIME-*
References
Return-Path
Sender
Subject

FILES

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

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

HISTORY