KB00022606 Turning Mailing Lists into News Groups

Mailing Lists, in the form of Discussion Forums (such as Mailtraq Support) are a very effective means of group communication. In effect, they are very similar to news groups. Of course the advantage is that anyone with mailing list software, such as Mailtraq, can host one.

Messages posted to such lists are, however, quite different to most e-mails. For example, because they are not addressed directly to the reader, they are usually of less importance than normal e-mail (and can usually be expired automatically). Further, most news articles are threaded (i.e. follow-ups and replies). Few mail clients effectively handle threaded messages, whereas almost every news client does this well.

Using Mailtraq's News-To-Mail and Mail-To-News gateways, it is possible to create a local news group and connect it to a mailing list of which you are a subscriber.

One requirement (although there are ways around this) is that the mailing list be able to send your messages to a different address to that which you write from.

As an example, this guide will take you step-by-step through creating a News Group gateway for the Mailtraq Support Group. In this example we will assume your domain name is domain.com.

1. Create a local news group called mailtraq.support
2. Go to the news group properties (by right-clicking on the news group).
3. Go to the News Gateway tab and enable the gateway
4. Go to the Mail Gateway tab and click on Add
5. In the E-Mail Address... field, enter mailtraq-support@netmail.demon.co.uk (the address to which messages are sent)
6. In the To: Field..., enter mailtraq-support@netmail.demon.co.uk again
7. Click on OK for the gateway, and then for the news group properties
8. Send a message to mailserver@netmail.demon.co.uk with just the line "subscribe mailtraq-support" in the message body
9. When you have received the welcome message (which may be some hours later), send another message to mailserver@netmail.demon.co.uk with the line "set mailtraq-support rec=mailtraq.support@domain.com"
   
   (This tells the mailing list to send messages to the gateway, rather than your address. Different mailing list processors will do this differently, so please read their welcome message.)

You can now use your news reader to access the local news group mailtraq.support on your server. Messages posted to it will instead be forwarded to the mailing list, and messages received from the mailing list will appear in the news group itself.

Note: notice that the local news group name includes a period. Some news clients validate the news group name by insisting that it contain at least one period, so we recommend either mailtraq.support, or local.mailtraq-support.