mailpost (8) Linux Manual Page

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…]] 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 -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 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.

-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 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

Written by Paul Vixie long ago and then hacked up by James Brister for INN integration.

$Id: mailpost.in 9831 2015-04-23 19:07:39Z iulius $

See Also

active(5), inews(1), inn.conf(5), nnrpd(8), uwildmat(3).