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Article #722

SCO UNIX 3.2v4/Cnews/NN mail to news gateway: How?

#722
From: Bill Irwin
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 08:34
53 lines
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I have recently discovered that our site is pushing incoming mail
list mail, which is fed into Cnews, back out to the mail list
distribution addresses.  I have turned off the news->mail portion
of this loop until I can resolve the problem.

As I receive from the list, our SCO MMDF system processes the
alias:

taylor-list:    "news| /u/lbin/inews -h -n twg.taylor-list"

This feeds the mail to Cnews' "inews" which posts to our local
group twg.taylor-list.

When we post to twg.taylor-list, our Cnews sys file processes:

mail:\
        twg.taylor-list/all:L:/usr/lib/sendmail taylor-uucp@gnu.ai.mit.edu

The docs for Cnews state that the "L" flag is supposed to only
send locally posted articles.  Either this flag isn't working or
the article that was just posted from inews is seen as a locally
posted article.  I suspect the latter.

I was advised by someone to use rmail instead of sendmail because
rmail doesn't generate any new headers.  This would send out the
duplicate with the same Article-ID as the original and other
sites would detect the duplicate and reject it.  This doesn't
seem like an efficient use of bandwidth.  I found that rmail
wasn't even posting real local originals because it didn't see a
"From" header.  Our NN aux script was posting news with a "From:"
(with a colon) header.

It appears that sendmail will create the needed "From" header and
mail it out.  The solution seems to be to get incoming mail
posted to Cnews without Cnews also seeing this post as a local
one.

If anyone have any suggestions they would be welcome.  We enjoy
being able to read mail list articles with the NN newsreader,
rather than cluttering up our mailboxes with every one.  It is
also very convenient to use the [F]ollowup process to mail a
response back to the list distribution.

I apologize to all those who have been affected by the
duplicates originating from our site, and trust that
someone who knows the nuances of SCO UNIX and Cnews will
give me what I'm certain is a little tip of what I'm doing
wrong.
-- 
Bill Irwin     -      The Westrheim Group     -    Vancouver, BC, Canada
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
uunet!twg!bill            (604) 431-9600 (voice) |     Your Computer  
bill@twg.bc.ca            (604) 430-4329 (fax)   |    Systems Partner
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From: bill@twg.bc.ca (Bill Irwin)
Subject: SCO UNIX 3.2v4/Cnews/NN mail to news gateway: How?
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Organization: The Westrheim Group (TWG)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 08:34:36 GMT
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