NEWSMAIL

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: 22 June 1989
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NAME

mailnews, sendnews - send unbatched news as mail
recenews, recpnews - receive mailed news
bdecode - decode encoded mailed news

SYNOPSIS

/usr/lib/newsbin/relay/mailnews address ...
/usr/lib/newsbin/relay/sendnews address ...
/usr/lib/newsbin/input/recenews
/usr/lib/newsbin/input/recpnews
/usr/lib/newsbin/input/bdecode [ file ]

DESCRIPTION

Sometimes it is necessary to transmit news via mail, to deal with network connections that have no notion of arbitrary file transfer or non-mail traffic. These programs handle unbatched transmission and batched or unbatched reception. (Batched transmission is handled by the batching subsystem; see newsbatch(8).)

Mailnews accepts news from its standard input, encodes it using bencode (see bencode(1) or newsbatch(8)) to ensure that stupid mailers do not corrupt it, and mails it to the addresses.

Sendnews does likewise, but uses an inferior method of mailer protection (prepending `N' to each line) which does not protect against all forms of mailer brain-damage. It is provided for backward compatibility; its use is discouraged.

Mailnews and sendnews are located in the default path of transmission commands in the sys file (see news(5)) so that they can be used from there without giving a full pathname.

Recenews receives encoded news sent by mailnews or a batcher, decodes it, and feeds it to rnews (see rnews(8)). Recpnews does likewise for mail protected with `N'. Normally one should arrange that mail arriving at the mailbox ``enews'' is sent to recenews and likewise for ``rnews'' (the name is historical, for compatibility again) and recpnews.

Bdecode passes standard input, or the file if there is one, to standard output, decoding the bencode encoding and stripping off debris prepended and appended by mailers.

HISTORY

Written at U of Toronto by Henry Spencer, with contributions by Geoff Collyer. Bdecode written at University of Waterloo by Reg Quinton and Ken Lalonde.