Gatewaying Mailing Lists

CAUTION, gatewaying mailing lists to public news groups is a little risky, don't do it lightly.

We recommend you use the new mechanism click here

Please NOTE: this system is obsolete, it is still documented here but we strongly recommend you use the new tomail.conf and getmail.conf builtin system click on the link above to get to the right web pages.

Two gateways are needed to make a news group and a mailing list 'identical', you must setup both so that a news post gets sent to the mailing list and so a mailing post gets posted to the news group.  You can of course just run one gateway if you don't need both lists to be identical.

Setting up a gateway from a "NEWS group" to a "MAILING LIST"

In newsfeeds.conf add a feed for the group you wish to gateway, the 'site' name can be anything meaningful to you.

  site juggling
          groups rec.juggling

(This will make DNews create juggling.feed in the workarea directory)

For Windows NT

Now to actually send the items, setup an xmit process for each mailing list. To do this edit addmail.cmd (which will be in /dnews with luck)

notepad addmail.cmd
  Change the -name to be the name in newsfeeds.conf
  Change SITE.NAME to match the site you have added to newsfeeds.conf (juggling)
  Change MAIL.HERE.COM to point to your mail server
  Change JUGLIST@HERE.COM to point to the actual mailing list
  addsvc -del dxmail1
  addsvc -add dxmail1 xmit.exe "dxmail1 MAIL.HERE.COM -name SITE.NAME -at *5 *
(cont. but should be on one line)   -mail JUGLIST@HERE.COM "

 addmail.cmd  (run the script to add the service) (This is NT only)
      Restart things:
      tellnews reload
      Start the xmit service in Control Panels (for nt)

The log file will be in the DNews (WORKAREA)SITE_NAME.log

Test the mailing list, if a loop occurs, disable it quickly and figure out why.

For Unix

In Unix put the following in the startup,

nohup xmit MAIL.GATEWAY.COM -name SITE.NAME -at "*5" "*" -mail JUGLIST@HERE.COM &

To get it running the first time just type the command by hand.

The log file will be in the DNews (WORKAREA)SITE_NAME.log

Test the mailing list, if a loop occurs, disable it quickly and figure out why.

Setting up a gateway from a MAILING LIST to a NEWS GROUP

Note: When configuring drobot/dposter make sure you don't specify the DNews spool directory for the workarea directory.
(i.e. Don't put drobot -dir d:\dnews\spool or dposter -dir /usr/local/dnews/spool etc.)

For Windows NT

These instructions are for NTMAIL and DMAIL.  You will find the same basic process works for almost any good mail server.

For NTMAIL

  juglist-robot
 (You will then need to add this user to your juglist mailing list,
 e.g.
  juglist-robot@here.com, so that this robot will get all messages
  that are posted to the mailing list)

     drobot -dir c:\ntmail\news -groups rec.juggling

For DMail

forward juglist-robot@your.domain |d:\dmail\drobot.exe -dir c:\ntmail\news -groups rec.juggling
 (You will then need to add this user (justlist-robot@your.domain) to your juglist mailing list, so
 this robot will get all messages  that are posted to the mailing list)

Now, setup the service to post these items.

  addsvc -del dposter
  addsvc -add dposter dposter.exe "dposter -dir c:\ntmail\news -to news.here.com"

Now start the services (from control panel) and then test posting a message and mailing a message to the mailing list and see if the newsgroup and mailing list are kept inline.

Using drobot with IMAIL

To get email sent to a list hosted on IMail Server to post to a newsgroup hosted on DNews, the program alias you create in IMail should have the following format:

	drobot -dir c:\gateway -groups rec.juggling -file

Note the addition of " -file " to the end of the program line, this tells drobot to take it's input from a file name passed to it rather than from stdin.

Using drobot with MDAEMON

In mdaemon (setup/auto-responders) there is an extra check-box "pass message to this process", which must be enabled. the cmd-line ("run this process" in mdaemon) for drobot is:

<full_path_to_drobot>\drobot.exe -dir <full_path_to_gateway_workarea> -group <newsgroup> -from <gateway_name> -file

For unix

In the .forward file put the path of drobot

|"/usr/local/dnews/drobot -dir /var/spool/mailnews -groups rec.juggling"

Add dposter to the startup, but start it by hand the first time with the same command.

nohup dposter -dir /var/spool/mailnews -to news.here.com &

With unix you must ensure that the work directory specified /var/spool/mailnews above, can be written to by the user who's account is receiving the email message, and by the dposter process.

Run the same test procedure as for windows.

Sending many groups to many mailing lists via one xmit gateway

Lets say you want to mirror 100 news groups into mailing lists, obviously you don't want 100 xmit processes running, here's how to do it:

In newsfeeds.conf

...
site lists
	groups comp.lang.*

Then start a single xmit process with parameters like this:

nohup xmit lists -smtp MAIL.GATEWAY.COM -at "*5" "*" -all "comp.lang.*"
-mail @HERE.COM  &

This will send messages to 'comp_lang_c@HERE.COM', and 'comp_lang_basic@HERE.COM' etc, you must define all these locall mail addresses.

See the xmit usage for an explanation of the switches used with xmit