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
-aaddr
If the -a flag is used, the value given is added to the article
as an Approved: header.
-bdatabase
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.
-cwait-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.
-ddistribution
If the -d flag is used, the value given is added to the article as a
Distribution: header.
-faddr
The -f flag is a synonym for the -r flag.
-h
Print usage information and exit.
-mmailing-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.
-ooutput-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".
-pport
Specifies the port on which nnrpd is listening, used for article posting.
If given, -p is passed along to inews.
-raddr
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.
-xheader[: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 9025 2010-03-21 16:49:41Z iulius $