RE: INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAIL2NEWS GATEWAYS
DATE: 2 FEBRUARY 1998
AUTHOR: D'Maris Coffman

In recent years, frustrated system administrators have closed 
standard mail-to-news gateways in view of spamming, abuse, and 
high traffic.  While most people use them simply for the sake
of convenience, others have limited or no capability to post
owing to restrictions placed on academic accounts, poor news
machines, and/or lack of a nntp (news) server at their ISP's.

There are two known remaining reliable methods for posting via 
mail2news gateways. Please do not abuse these, or they too 
will no doubt disappear.

For those who have the ability to add a 'Newsgroups:' line to 
your headers (but for some reason don't have the ability 
to post directly to a nntp server), put 'alt.starfleet.rpg'
in the newsgroups line and send the post to one of these:

mail2news@nym.alias.net
mail2news@news.news.demon.net

You _must_ have the capability to add that newsgroups line to use
these. Most non-Unix/Linux mail programs do not have this feature.
The old system of putting the newsgroup in the address has been
disabled on the two services above.  Thus, the following will 
_not_ work:

alt-starfleet-rpg@nym.alias.net
alt.starfleet.rpg@nym.alias.net
alt-starfleet-rpg@news.news.demon.net
alt-starfleet-rpg@*.news.demon.net
alt.starfleet.rpg@*.news.demon.net

where * is any of the numerous machines at Demon which used to 
allow this. (Note: Those of you have have used the above recently
and seen your posts in the newsgroups should know that is because
Gold admin has been bouncing them to the group for you via the 
below means.)

If you don't have the ability to add that newsgroups line (the
case for most of you), you can use the following:

mail2news-YYYYMMDD-alt.starfleet.rpg@anon.lcs.mit.edu

Where YYYY is the four digit year, MM is the two digit month, and
DD is the two digit day.  For example, for yesterday:

mail2news-19990201-alt.starfleet.rpg@anon.lcs.mit.edu

would have sent your post to the newsgroup.

Presumably, this would also work for other groups:

mail2news-19990203-alt.startrek.creative@anon.lcs.mit.edu

would send your post to alt.startrek.creative on 3 February.
Based on experience, this machine seems to tolerate days which
are off by 48 hours of the actual date either direction. 
Anything outside that window will be rejected.

As it happens, the anon.lcs.mit.edu machine actually is running
a script that appends that newsgroups line to a post and re-mails
it to the 'nym.alias.net' machine.  Thus, the posts will appear on
the newsgroup as coming from that address.

Hopefully, this gives people an idea of how mail2news gateways
work.  Additional questions may be directed towards your CO
or Gold Fleet admin.