Subject: Re: Requaest for help.

From: Don Wells <dwells at nrao.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 1998 17:31:33 -0500

>>>>> "Zoltan" == Zoltan Nagy <nagy at anl.gov> writes:
    Zoltan>   To whom is involved in running this newsgroup/mailing
    Zoltan> list.. I found this newsgroup in the book entitled "The
    Zoltan> Internet for Scientist and Engineers" by B.J. Thomas.
    Zoltan>    This book mentions that this newsgroup is also mirrored
    Zoltan> on mailing list "fits-bits at fits.cx.nrao.edu."
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                                fitsbits at nrao.edu

    Zoltan>    I am involved with a newsgroup "sci.chem.electrochem,"
    Zoltan> which is mirrored on a mailing list "eletqm-l."  I have
    Zoltan> been crossposting messages between the the newsgroup and
    Zoltan> the mailing list manually far the last couple of years.. I
    Zoltan> would really like to have a software that could do the job
    Zoltan> automatically.. is your newsgroup connected to the
    Zoltan> mailing list.. manually or automatically?

The answer is: "automatically".

Traffic arriving in newsgroup sci.astro.fits is piped to a Perl script
named 'news2mail' which Emails it to <fitsbits at majordomo.cv.nrao.edu>
(NRAO uses the 'Majordomo' package for its Email exploders). The
<fitsbits> exploder is configured so that traffic from subscribers is
"exploded" automatically, but traffic from non-subscribers must be
approved (by me). This means that subscribers to <fitsbits> do not see
the "spam" traffic which is often posted to sci.astro.fits. The spam
postings are usually cancelled by somebody within a few hours, but not
before they are forwarded to <fitsbits>, and so I must reject such
spam traffic almost every day (my fingers long ago memorized the
keystrokes).  The approval of messages is a painless process which is
well automated, at least for the "VM" mailreader which I use, under
GNU Emacs.

The mailing list for <fitsbits> includes the entry
<mail2news-astro-fits at cv3.cv.nrao.edu>, and so all traffic which is
exploded is sent to this mailbox, which pipes it to a Perl script
named 'mail2news', which posts it to newsgroup sci.astro.fits.
Actually, in the NRAO installation 'news2mail' and 'mail2news' are the
same script---the Perl script knows what to do from which name is used
to execute it.

This forwarding scheme would be an infinite loop except for the fact
that news servers check the Message-IDs and suppress IDs which have
already been seen.

    Zoltan>    Could you advise me about a software that connects the
    Zoltan> group and the list?  Or, at least, could you point me in
    Zoltan> the right direction for looking for such a software or for
    Zoltan> asking about it?

See the file

    ftp://tarsier.cv.nrao.edu/pub/src/misc/news2mail.gz

File 'news2mail.gz' is 1 Kb, and is dated Dec 11, 1994.  This is an
old, publically available version which does not contain local
modifications which are in NRAO's current installation. The comments
in the Perl code seem clear enough to me. The NRAO systems person who
installed this code does not know where he got it, or who was the
original author.  He tells me that the installation and configuration
of these scripts is 'standard news server and majordomo hacking', and
that an analogous implementation coded in 'Tcl' [Tool Control
Language] is available somewhere.

I also did a Web search, and found the following URL, in which
similar Perl code is available as two separate files:

    http://harper-hall.cit.cornell.edu/news/gates.html

-Don
-- 
  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         dwells at nrao.edu
		    http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA