snmail,v0.3.8(8)

💌 snmail — mail-to-news filter

okay bestie, welcome to the snmail,v0.3.8(8) page from the System Manager's Manual section 8 (that's the admin-y section, iykyk). This is the glow-up of the classic manual, same facts, way more fun. Let's get into it 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

snmail — mail-to-news filter 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

snmail [-sP] [listname [prefix]]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So here's the vibe: snmail reads one single email message on standard input, and writes the converted message to standard output. That output? It's literally made to be fed straight into snstore. Chef's kiss. 👑

Here's everything snmail does to your message, no cap:

• If the first line is a UUCP From_ line, it gets silently discarded. gone. bye. 🙈
• A Newsgroups: line is added with the value of prefixlistname (that's prefix concatenated with listname), and any other Newsgroups: lines that already exist get removed.
• A Path: line is created from all the Received: lines, and then those Received: lines are removed.
• All header lines are unfolded.
• If there's no message ID, one gets created.
• The message IDs sitting in all References: lines and In-Reply-To: lines are collected into a single References: line.
• All lines are rewritten to end in CRLF.
• And a lone . on a line gets written at the end of the message.

Also, snmail will accept and pass on messages with invalid header fields. It's very forgiving like that. 🫶

snmail is meant to be run from a .forward file, or from /etc/aliases (if you're running sendmail or something similar), or from a .qmail file (if qmail is your thing). And heads up — snmail may write status or error messages to standard error.

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -s — pipe output straight to snstore, don't write to standard output. This exists so the exit status doesn't get lost in a shell pipeline (we love not losing exit statuses 💀). If you use this flag, it's also a really good idea to also use -c, which tells snstore to check if the article already exists.

🌈 Other options 🌈

snmail also accepts options meant for snstore, namely -c, -v, and -n, and these get passed on uninterpreted. Zero meddling. 👑

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🎀 ARGUMENTS 🎀

• prefix — this is the prefix of the newsgroup. If you don't specify it, it defaults to local. (note the trailing .). Also: prefix may not begin with a . (dot), but it may be empty.
• listname — this completes the newsgroup name. If you don't specify it, it's the local part of the address in the Return-Path: line, as long as that exists and isn't empty. Otherwise? It's the local part of the message's first From:. So like, if the message came from the list <linux-lemmings@vger.rutgers.edu>, then the default newsgroup becomes local.linux-lemmings. And listname may be empty if prefix isn't.

bestie, you might wanna have a file /var/spool/sn/prefixlistname/.nopost so you can deny posting from all and sundry — that stops the mailing list newsgroup from getting contaminated. 🧼

Also, prefix and listname may contain uppercase characters — those get converted to lowercase. no shouting in newsgroup names 💅

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💜 USAGE 💜

There are two ways of forwarding mail to the sn news spool:

1. Directly from a user's mail address. ✉️
2. Forwarded to a central address, and then invoking snmail. 📬

The big concern here is permissions — because while anyone can run snmail, not everyone may store mail in the spool. Mail setups vary a lot, so basically... you're on your own here. 😭

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🦋 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🦋

• SNROOT — if this is set and is not empty, its value is used in place of /var/spool/sn, the default news spool directory.
• PATH — if -s was specified, this determines where to look for snstore, before looking in /usr/sbin.

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⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

snmail exits 0 if the message was successfully converted and written — or if the message ID already exists in the ID database and the message was not stored or converted.

snmail exits with:

• 1 on usage error
• 2 on operational error
• 3 if the mail message wasn't in the proper format

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🌟 N.B. 🌟

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🫶 this gem is by Harold Tay, and it's snmail,v0.3.8(8) — version 0.3.8, section 8 of the System Manager's Manual. no date on this one, iconic honestly. go forth and filter that mail-to-news, you absolute main character 👑✨