Mail2News gateway

A mail2news Gateway enables the publication of newsgroups -Artikeln in Usenet via e-mail without having a special news reader to use. The interface , the gateway , receives the e-mail, adapts it to the Usenet format and then forwards the article to the Usenet. Most commonly, these gateways are used in conjunction with remailers for anonymous posting (publishing) of newsgroup articles. This option can also be used if you do not have access to a "good" news server .

Mail2News gateways do not anonymize news articles themselves, but publish them almost unchanged, including the received From: address (sender information in the e-mail). The operators of [e-mail] also expressly point out that every article that is routed through their M2N gateway - but also unsuccessful attempts - is logged. One should assume that the log ( log file ) contains enough information to find out who sent the article, even if this cannot be seen in the Usenet article.

In connection with the remailer, the original author of the email cannot be identified from the log file, but only the remailer who sent the email to the M2N gateway.

Similar to anonymous remailers, the Mail2News services are also offered free of charge. The operators are not obliged to continuously operate their services. As a result, any existing M2N gateway can stop working without prior notification.

abuse

The continued existence of M2N gateways is called into question if they are misused for illegal or generally offensive publications.

The following points apply explicitly to [e-mail], precise information about other M2N gateways can be obtained from the servers themselves.

• Material may only be distributed via Mail2News gateways if this is compatible with the laws of the country in which the respective server is located. In the United States, the laws of the state concerned also apply .
• Counterfeiting of articles is prohibited.
• Articles that affect the operation of the gateway and other services of the operator due to their size are not permitted (accordingly also the dispatch of several hundred articles via the same M2N gateway in one day).

Queries and examples

Not all M2N gateways reach the same number of newsgroups. However, you can find out in advance which newsgroups are served by a particular server, or the availability of a particular newsgroup or a number of special newsgroups . The procedure for different servers can vary, so the help text of the service used should be read in any case.

The following query is possible for the M2N gateway "[e-mail]" (currently - Feb. 2008- out of service):

Help text
E-Mail to [e-mail] with the subject : Help

List of all available newsgroups:
E-Mail to [e-mail] with the subject: list Attention: This complete list is bigger than 200 KB and contains more than 10.000 groups! This can be too much for some e-mail programs.

Examples from the help for [e-mail]

• Subject: list comp \ .unix

lists all available groups whose names start with "comp.unix".

• Subject: list. * Linux

lists all available groups whose names contain the string "linux".

• Subject: list alt. * (Security | privacy)

lists groups that begin with "alt" and contain the character strings "security" or "privacy".

• Subject: list. * \. Test $

lists all available groups that end with ".test".

Additional header ( header information )

If news postings are NOT anonymized and transmitted to M2N gateways, the header information of the email is also used for the news article. The subject is adopted, as is the From: line (sender email) and, if necessary, further headers. The M2N server expects a " Newsgroups :" header in every message . If it is missing, the message is rejected and sent back to the sender ("bounced"). It is therefore necessary to include such a header in the e-mail (“Newsgroups:”, i.e. the plural of the word for the header, must always be used). Some e-mail programs allow you to include additional headers in e-mails, while others cannot. Under Windows , for example, the freeware program “ Pegasus Mail ” makes it very easy to use additional headers.

Naturally, anonymous Usenet posts are not sent to the M2N service by the original sender, but by a remailer. Different remailers handle the header information they receive differently.

Mixmaster remailers always allow the use of user-defined headers, including "Newsgroups:". Mixmaster is easy to use in conjunction with a program like QuickSilver or Jack B. Nymble (JBN).

Cypherpunk remailers that allow the insertion of custom headers are marked with the property "hash" in the published remail lists. The programs mentioned make work easier here too.

To anonymously using Cypher Punk Remailern and M2N gateways post, is sufficient in principle, however, a simple email client (the use of PGP or GnuPG for encryption of messages is, however, strongly recommended!).

The practice

Newsgroups header or address

A Usenet article that is sent via e-mail and should contain the address of the authentic sender in the From: and Reply-To: lines is addressed to an M2N gateway.

If you have an e-mail program that allows you to add your own headers, you can add a “Newsgroups:” header. If you reply to a Usenet article, you should also add the “References:” header. In this "References" header, the message IDs of the previous articles on the topic must be given, at least the message ID of the article to which you are referring. This header is required by the news servers in order to assign the article to the correct discussion tree (the so-called thread ).

Examples:

To: [e-mail]
Subject: re: M2N-Test
Newsgroups: de.test
References: <[e-mail]>

(Even with only one group it says "Newsgroups:", even with only one reference "References:" must be given.)

Several groups are separated from each other by commas without spaces :

To: [e-mail]
Subject: re: M2N-Test
Newsgroups: de.test,alt.test,misc.test
References: <[e-mail]>

It is not possible to include additional headers in the e-mail program

Even if you cannot add additional headers to your own e-mail program, news items can be published via M2N servers. For this purpose, the addressed groups can be built into the e-mail address if this is supported by the M2N service. But the specification of "References" is not supported here.

In the case of the M2N gateway "[e-mail]": mail2news-YYYYMMDD- [group] @ anon.lcs.mit.edu where YYYY is the current year, MM the month and DD the current day.

A posting to DE.TEST would therefore go to the following address: [e-mail]

Several groups can be separated from one another with "+". For example, to post to ALT.TEST and MISC.TEST, send the mail to: [e-mail]

Unwanted advertising email

The use of an authentic, responsive e-mail address in news articles almost always means that sooner or later the sender will be covered with advertising e-mails ( spam ). Different countermeasures lead to different degrees of success.

If you use Mail2News gateways, you can protect yourself from unwanted advertising by using the “NOSPAM” address of the server. E.g. [e-mail] or, if the e-mail program does not allow custom headers: mail2news_nospam-YYYYMMDD-[gruppe]@anon.lcs.mit.edu

“Spam bots ” that search Usenet for addresses are then (mostly) deceived by the fact that the sender address has been changed; but in a way that still allows human readers to read the authentic address and use it for direct replies to the author.

Anonymous posting

Anonymous articles, including the additional (“newsgroups”) headers, are forwarded to the M2N gateway by a remailer. All Mixmaster remailers or Cypherpunk remailers are suitable for this, if they are identified by the "hash" property in the remailer lists. If a chain of remailers is used for anonymization, the last one in it should support the hash option.

The message body of an anonymous Usenet posting via Cypherpunk remailer and M2N gateway begins as follows:

Anon-To: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: gruppe1,gruppe2,gruppe3
Subject: Betreff-Header des Artikels
Weitere-Header: Nach Bedarf

Text des Artikels…

Common problems

Articles that cannot be posted will be returned to the sender. An error message should explain the problem, although this does not help when posting through an anonymous remailer; therefore you should not use a pseudonym or real address.

Often the "Newsgroups" header is missing in rejected articles (see above).

In addition, newsgroups in the "Newsgroups" header are often separated from one another by spaces, which is also not allowed:

NOT CORRECT:
Newsgroups: alt.test, de.test, misc.test

CORRECT:
Newsgroups: alt.test,de.test,misc.test