Mail-to-News Gateways

Historical Note

One of the first subdivisions of newsgroups was into "FA" (From Arpanet) and "net" (all the other newsgroups).

The material from Arpanet was primarily mail-to-news. Originally, it was a one-way connection, but later at least some gateways became bi-directional.

Definition

Duties of a Gateway:

   A Gateway transforms an article into the native message format of
   another medium, or translates the messages of another medium into news
   articles.  Encapsulation of a news article into a message of MIME type
   application/news-transmission, or the subsequent undoing of that
   encapsulation, is not gatewaying, since it involves no transformation
   of the article.

   There are two basic types of Gateway, the Outgoing Gateway that
   transforms a news article into a different type of message, and the
   Incoming Gateway that transforms a message from another medium into a
   news article and injects it into a netnews system.  These are handled
   separately below.

   The primary dictate for a gateway is:

        Above all, prevent loops.

Mail-to-News Gateways

From: newgroups-request@uunet.uu.net (David C Lawrence)
Subject: Mailing Lists Available in Usenet
Date: 25 Nov 1996 18:16:19 -0500
Message-ID: <gateways.n_848963777@uunet.uu.net>

Summary: A list of mailing lists gatewayed with worldwide newsgroups

Gateways exist in several forms.  They can be fully bi-directional between
the list and the group, one way from the list to the group, or only
partially passed from the group to the list and back, with the list
moderator selecting articles which are appropriate.  Lists can also be
packaged as digests --- multiple messages bound in a single collection ---
and possibly appear as such in the corresponding group.

Traffic on mailing lists whose incoming traffic from the corresponding
newsgroup is unrestricted is often very unlike that which comes to lists
that solely exist in the mail realm. This is because of differences of
the two overall environments and how they are used by people. Both list
members and group participants should be wary of it and try to be
sympathetic with the other side, but this is often a point missed by the
group users who don't even realise their articles are being redistributed
via an automatic gateway.

Gateways that have moderators which review submissions are listed in a
companion posting, "List of Moderators for Usenet".  As noted in that
article, most modern news system software supports automatic submission
to the moderator of articles posted to the group.  If that mechanism
does not work at your site you will have to directly mail your article
to the submission address.

Mailing lists also have administrative contact addresses for reaching the
people who run them.  These addresses are meant to be used for issues
pertaining to the operation of the lists, rather than for messages which
are meant to be published in the list.

Links
NNTP Gateway for Usenet (vbulletin)
Gmane (e-mail to NNTP archive--not integrated with Usenet) "Mail To News And Back Again")
GNU Mailman
mail2news and news2mail (David Cantrell)
News::Gateway (Russ Allbery)
newsgate
news-to-web software
news-archive
news-web

This list is for informational purposes only. Listing a service here does not mean that the Board endorses the service.

A Note on Netiquette

People should not hook up gateways like this without the prior consent of the mailing list owner. Consultation with the newsgroup is advised as well, although that may be difficult with an unmoderated newsgroup.