General

m2n (mail to news gateway) mediates between a mail server (MTA) and a news server, both installed on the same machine. Incoming mails are processed and posted to a news group. This is useful for people, who want to read mailing lists like they read newsgroups.

Unlike other mail2news gateways, m2n can cope with malformed mail headers and does not send bounces back to the sender. You don't want to flood a mailinglist with your error messages, do you?

Features

Integration

Reads mail from STDIN, which is how Exim 4 or Procmail pipe their mails to external programs. The processed mail is piped to /usr/bin/rnews.

Error handling

In case your news server does not accept the posting, eg. because it is too old or has malformed headers, the error message is sent to a special email address instead of bounced back to the original sender (who usually can't and isn't willing to do anything about the situation anyway)

Cope with malformed headers

A lot of problems can be fixed on the fly. Wrong or double Date headers, missing subjects or sender informations. You'd be amazed to see how many crap is sent over mailing lists :-(

Requirements

As m2n is neither a mail nor a news server, it needs both, installed on the same machine. The setup has been tested with Exim 4 and INN 2.4.

To run, m2n needs Perl 5, as well as the Date::Parse library (included in package libtimedate-perl under Debian).