.: Mail2News

----
Help make your posted articles appear faster and get access to more regional newsgroups. If you run a news server, please consider giving
transfer privileges to anon.lcs.mit.edu. The more news servers this machine has access to, the more reliable its posting services will be
and the more news groups it will be able to reach. If you can give anon.lcs.mit.edu access to a news server, please notify postmaster@anon.lcs.mit.edu. Thanks!
----

[mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu is also known as mail2news@nym.alias.net. However, mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu is the preferred address. The
nym.alias.net address may cease to work at any point with little warning.]

INTRODUCTION

This service allows you to post news articles to usenet through E-mail. It can be useful if you do not have access to a good news server, or if you wish to post through an anonymous remailer. If you don't have access to a good news server, you may also be interested in reading news through an open NNTP server. You can find a lists of open NNTP servers at this URLs:
http://www.jammed.com/~newzbot/
And a list of other mail2news gateways at:
http://www.sabotage.org/~don/mail2news.html

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USING mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu:

To post an article to usenet, mail it to mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu. You must specify the newsgroup(s) to which you want to post with a
"Newsgroups:" header in your mail message. When posting to multiple groups, place all newsgroups in the same "Newsgroups:" header line,
separated by commas (but NO spaces). For example, to post a message to alt.test and misc.test, place the following line in your mail header:
Newsgroups: alt.test,misc.test

Note that this service does NOT anonymize the news articles it posts. The address from which an article is mailed will become the return address of the posted news article.

The mail2news software passes mail messages directly through to the news server with almost no modification. It does not process "::" or
"##" lines in mail, nor does it understand "Post-To:" commands. All mail received must already be a properly formatted news message (as
described by RFC 1036) with a "Newsgroups:" line in the header of the mail message. Otherwise, the news server will reject the article and
it will be bounced back to you.

To receive a list of all newsgroups reachable through this mail to news gateway, send mail to mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu with subject
"list" and no "Newsgroups:" header. The complete list of available newsgroups is quite large (200+K 10,000+ groups), and can break many
mailers. You can therefore query for particular newsgroups by fingering groups@anon.lcs.mit.edu. To obtain through E-mail a list of
only those newsgroups starting with a particular pattern, you can include an egrep-style regular expression on the subject line. For instance,
Subject: list comp\.unix
would list only newsgroups whose names begin "comp.unix".
Subject: list .*linux
would list all newsgroups whose names contain the substring "linux".
Subject: list alt.*(security|privacy)
would list all newsgroups beginning "alt" and containing either
the word "security" or the word "privacy". Finally,
Subject: list .*\.test$
would list all newsgroups ending ".test".

To see a copy of this message through finger, you can finger mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu. To receive a copy of this help message
through E-mail, you can send mail to mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu with subject "help" and no "Newsgroups:" header.

ENCODING NEWSGROUPS IN THE ADDRESS:

If you cannot figure out a way to add a Newsgroups header to your mail messages, you can instead include the list of newsgroups to which you
wish to post in the mail2news E-mail address. To post to group alt.test, for instance, you can send mail to:

<mail2news-YYYYMMDD-alt.test@anon.lcs.mit.edu>

where YYYYMMDD is the current date (year, month, day). To post to multiple groups, you can separate them with "+" characters. For
instance, to post to alt.test and misc.test, send mail to:

<mail2news-YYYYMMDD-alt.test+misc.test@anon.lcs.mit.edu>

You must use addresses of this form to cross-post articles. If instead you address one message to several destinations of the form <mail2news-YYYYMMDD-groupN>, your article will show up in at most one of the groups you specify. This is a result of the way news servers handle Message IDs; it is not a limitation of the mail2news software.

AVOIDING SPAM:

If you post a usenet article from a replyable E-mail address, you will very likely end up receiving a great deal of unsolicited commercial E-mail. To avoid this, you can instead mail your articles to: <mail2news_nospam@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
or
<mail2news_nospam-YYYYMMDD-alt.test@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
which mangle your From header so as to foil automated address cullers while still permitting humans to figure out your E-mail address.

COMMON PROBLEMS:

Any articles that can't be posted will be bounced back to the sender with a vaguely informative error message. Though this won't help you if you are posting through an anonymous remailer, it should definitely shed some light on things if you post either directly or through a pseudonymous remailer.

The most common reason articles cannot be posted is that there is no Newsgroups header in the mail message. Putting a Newsgroups header in
a message is NOT the same thing as beginning your mail message with "Newsgroups: ...". Some mail programs let you edit mail headers in the same buffer as the mail messages you compose. Others have more complicated mechanisms for adding new headers, and still other mail programs simply may not let you add new headers. It is beyond the scope of this mail message to cover all client mail programs. However, on a unix machine, as a last resort, you can always feed an entire message, headers and all, to "/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t". If your mailer will not allow you to add a Newsgroups header, you can also include the newsgroups in the mail2news E-mail address, as described above.

Another common problem is whitespace in the Newsgroups header. You are not allowed to put any space between the names of newsgroups. This is an illegal header:
Newsgroups: alt.group.one, alt.group.two, alt.group.three
It must instead be written as:
Newsgroups: alt.group.one,alt.group.two,alt.group.three

POLICY:

An article mailed to this mail to news gateway will be distributed to news servers on thousands of machines throughout the entire world. You may only use this service to post materials which you can legally distribute under Massachusetts and US Federal law. Articles you post must also be legally exportable from the United States. Forging articles is also strictly prohibited. You may not post such large numbers of articles that you delay mail2news and other services on the same machine. Posting more than a few hundred articles in one day will almost certainly cause such delays, and is thus not permitted.

YOU ASSUME ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ARTICLES YOU POST THROUGH THIS SERVICE.

Please avoid posting the same article multiple times to different news groups. List all destination groups on the Newsgroups line of one message. The Newsgroups line can be longer than 80 characters, so create one long Newsgroups line even if it is wider than your terminal. Long Newsgroups lines are generally frowned upon unless the article is extremely important. However, multiple identical messages are even worse as they require more disk space on news servers.

Please also avoid sending test-only messages to non-test newsgroups. You can obtain an up to date list of all supported news groups as described above. If you can post to alt.test and the newsgroup you want to reach is in the list of supported groups, it means you can post to the group you want--there is no need to annoy people with a test message first.

Finally, let me repeat what was stated above: This service does NOT anonymize the news articles it posts. Furthermore, the administrators of mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu make no commitment to concealing your identity if you send mail directly to mail2news or forge mail by telneting to the SMTP port on this machine. Use an anonymous remailer if you wish to post anonymously. Requests to help and list, however, will not be logged. For maximum privacy, though, you might want to get these lists either through a nym or by chaining a finger request--for instance with "finger
groups@anon.lcs.mit.edu@host2@host1."

More concretely: Every article posted through here is logged. Even failed attempts to post are logged (unless your mail is a help request or a list request). You should also assume that the logs contain enough information to track exactly where each article was mailed from--even if that information is not visible in the Usenet news article. Furthermore, the mail2news software is periodically modified, and without any warning it might one day start passing through a different set of headers, which could disclose your identity if you were previously relying on mail2news for "light" anonymity.

These statements are here because the administrators of anon.lcs.mit.edu care about your privacy. We don't want you relying on this service for anonymity because we sometimes need to look through log files to find bugs, and we sometimes need to change the software to fix bugs and add features. If we tried to offer anonymity directly through mail2news, we wouldn't be able to do these things and the reliability of the service would suffer. However, there are services available on anon.lcs.mit.edu and other machines which will allow you to post anonymously. The following web sites offer a good introduction to these services if you need to know more:

http://publius.net/n.a.n.html
http://www.well.com/user/abacard/remail.html
http://www.stack.urc.tue.nl/~galactus/remailers/index.html
http://publius.net/rlist.html

The mail2news software running on this machine is not unfortunately available in any kind of nice distribution. If you would like to run a public mail2news gateway and you can get transfer or post privileges to 2 or more reliable news servers, then contact postmaster@anon.lcs.mit.edu. You can get a snapshot of the source and some help setting it up (since there's no documentation).

CONTACT:

Report any problems with this mail2news service to: postmaster@anon.lcs.mit.edu