RumorMill Setup Documentation

EMail Gateway



The EMail gateway allows the system administrator to have RumorMill read a POP mailbox and put the EMail read into the article database. EMail may also be sent when articles are post, but that capability is described in the Newsgroups documentation.



Screen shot of email gateway windows


To configure the EMail gateway, the system administrator must provide an EMail address for herself. A host that provides SMTP service (sending EMail) must also be provided. In this example, the SMTP server is running on the same host as RumorMill and the shorthand for "the local host", 127.0.0.1, has been specified as the SMTP host. Use the "Check for mail to send every" parameter to specify how often RumorMill checks for mail it has to send and the availability of the SMTP host.


For RumorMill to add EMail to the article database, "POP Host", "POP Account", and "POP Password" must all be specified. The "Check for EMail every" parameter specifies how often RumorMill checks for new EMail. Checking the "Add Reply-to from POP host and account" check box will cause RumorMill to insert a "Reply-to: " header into the article when added to the database. The reply-to address will be the specified POP account and POP host.


Finally, the system administrator may specify a header to be inserted into outgoing EMail. In general, the user supplied header should start with "X-" if the header is not one of the EMail defined headers. However, if the user uses a standard header, such as "Subject:", then RumorMill will rename the existing "Subject:" header to "X-NNTP-Subject:" and insert the user defined "Subject:" header.


If the article about to be EMailed has the following headers:

    Subject: RumorMill Header Mapping
    Newsgroups: local.testing


and the User EMail Header is defined as follows:

    Subject: [^2] ^1


The resulting headers in the EMail sent are:

    Subject: [local.testing] RumorMill Header Mapping
    X-NNTP-Subject: RumorMill Header Mapping
    Newsgroups: local.testing



The following fields can be substituted into a User EMail Header:


	

		^1
		Previous header contents
	

	

		^2
		Newsgroup(s) for which this article had EMail exploders defined
	

	

		^3
		Host name of the machine running RumorMill
	








Screen shot of email gateway entry window


Finally, when RumorMill reads EMail from a POP host, it must have some way of deciding which news group to put the EMail into. The "EMail to Groups Map" provides this capability. Each entry in the map describes the header to find, and the text that must be contained within that header (not an exact match, but a contains match). If it matches, the EMail is added to the specified newsgroup.





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