recnews

[Karl Kleinpaste]

liz at grian.UUCP writes:
   I have a local mailing list set up to feed mail to a local newsgroup
   using recnews as:
   [...a piped alias...]
   which is posting the mail to cps.common pretty much as I wanted, but
   the articles are posted in a strange order -- nowhere near the original
   order in which the mail was written.  I know enough not to expect the
   articles to be in the exact order they were written, but they have
   always arrived on grian in a pretty reasonable order

This may be caused by your sendmail configuration being set up for the
"prog" mailer to have the `e' "expensive" flag, and hence it doesn't
even attempt delivery.  It just waits for a queue run, by which time
the order of things found in /usr/spool/mqueue is bound to be mighty
random.  Take out the `e' in the F=<stuff> field of the "prog" mailer
definition and see what happens.

As a countersuggestion, we do a mail-into-news conversion this way in
sendmail.cf:

CNcomp misc news rec sci soc talk unix-pc ddn alt
S0
R$=N.$*<@$=W.$D>	$#news$:$1.$2			Posting to news

And then the "news" mailer is defined as

Mnews,	P=/usr/lib/news/recnews, F=DFMls, M=65535, A=recnews $u

Essentially, it detects a newsgroup-destined piece of mail via a `.'
in the name with a first word being one of the standard newsgroup
classes.  It works very well, and in fact our CN includes a few other
words for local newsgroup classes.  And you don't have to maintain
aliases in /usr/lib/aliases as separate entities.