Subject: How to post articles via e-mail?

From: Michael Schmitz <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Jul 1995 18:02:03 GMT

Is there anyway of posting articles with an e-mail program? What is the
ordinary
way of posting articles?
Thanx.

---

From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 1995 09:54:54 +0100 (BST)

Forgetting about Pine for a moment...

The usual way of reading and sending e-mail messages is to use a mailer 
program.  This lets you read messages that have been delivered to your 
mail file on your computer, and to send messages out (usually directly or 
indirectly using the SMTP protocol).

Usenet News is slightly different in that articles don't get delivered to 
a personal file "just for you".  Instead they are held in a central, 
shared directory.  They then can be accessed directly by a news reading 
program as part of the normal filestore, or by the special news protocol 
"NNTP".

Now for Pine...

Pine is an integrated mailer and news reader program.  It attempts to 
provide a consistent, coherent interface so that whether you are reading, 
sending or replying to e-mail or news articles it "feels" the same.  And 
overall it does a pretty good job; we have many users here who probably 
wouldn't have got into Usenet News if they'd had the hurdle of learning 
yet another program whilst also battling the newsgroups themselves.

So, if you're asking "can I send Usenet News articles using a mail 
program" then the answer is "Yes".  Pine will let you read and post 
articles using the NNTP protocol, assuming you have access to a news 
server that allows you to both read and post articles.

However in some cases people only have access to news servers that allow 
them to _read_ news (not post their own articles).  For example, it may 
be a limited service available to people not working at a particular 
establishment.

If this is your case, then the question becomes "can I send an e-mail 
message somewhere to get it magically converted into an article in a 
newsgroup?"  The answer is again yes... you will need to send the message 
to a Mail-to-News gateway computer.  Typically a newsgroup with name 
	comp.sys.blah
could be reached as
	[email-masked]

Note the change of the "."s to "-"s.

The nitty gritty is where such machines are.  I know there are some 
publiclly useable ones....  but their addresses elude my memory at 
present.  Perhaps someone else can remember?  (Wasn't one run by DEC?)

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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