Mail2News Mini-Howto: Introduction
2. IntroductionMost Internet sites are always seeking ways to improve the usage of the
limited bandwidth awailable across their link to the Internet.Should more than one user subscribe to the same mailing list, there is
going to be traffic duplication. If there are a number of such
duplications - or the traffic on the lists is high, the consumption of
bandwidth increases.By subscribing the site to a list (if this is allowed by the list
owner) and 'gating' the email traffic to the local news server, it is
possible to make mailing lists accessible to all site users, or, using
the security features of 'innd', to limit the access to certain users.Such a site subscription (particularly if there are a number of high traffic
lists) can make worthwhile savings in bandwidth usage.Reading list traffic in news reader also offers users the advantages of
threading (which is not available in many mail user agents) and keeps
their mail 'inbox' free for possibly more urgent, personal email.This mini-HOWTO describes setting up the 'mail2news.pl' script to
accomplish this.2.1 Finding mail2news.plThe author has been unable to find mail2news.pl on CPAN (the
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) - but it may just have been
overlooked. It is however on sunsite.unc.edu - somewhere - and also on
ftp.redhat.com.As this Perl script is not lengthy, it is appended to this howto.
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