To: uucp-news@cbosgd
Subject: A new program: postnm
Message-ID: <467517088@hou3c.UUCP>

This program is not quite finished yet, but I thought I would let you
know about it.

NAME:
	Postnm - post news and/or mail

SYNOPSYS:
	postnm -x [ file ]

DESCRIPTION:

Postnm reads and article from the file, or from the standard input if
no filename is specified.  If the article header contains a Newsgroup:
line, the article is posted.  If it contains To:, Cc:, or Bcc: lines,
the article is mailed to the specified recipients.

Postnm attempts to pass only valid articles to inews.  Postnm cannot
guarentee to pass only valid mail to the mail program because of the
lack of standardization of mail under UNIX.  Therefore, tries to accept
a variety of mail formats and to pass them through to the mailer
unchanged.

The input to the program should look like a USENET article or a piece
of RFC822 mail.  Some headers supported by postnm are:

To:, Cc:, and Bcc:
	These lines are scanned for address to be passed to the mail
	program.  Commas between the addresses are optional.  Any RFC
	822 address should be accepted as long as it is formatted
	sensibly (no comments within the address, and no white space
	except within angle brackets or around the at sign).  Some
	legal address lines are:
		To: "Kenneth Almquist" @ hou3c.UUCP  (That's me)
		To: Kenneth Almquist <@cbosgd.UUCP: ka@hou3c.UUCP>
	The address is passed to the mailer uninterpreted except that
	comments and any enclosing angle brackets are deleted.

Newsgroups:, Followup-To:
	Newsgroups on these lines are separated by white space and/or
	commas.

From:, Reply-To:
	On posted news, these lines will be converted to the format:
		From: user@machine (Real Name)

References:
	This line is passed through to news.  If you don't include an
	In-reply-to: line, one will be generated from the References:
	line.

Command:
	This specifies that the article is a reply or a followup.  If
	"Command: reply" is specified, any Newsgroup: line will be
	ignored.  If "Command: followup" is specified, any "To:" line
	will be ignored.  This way, if you type a followup command and
	then decide that your reply really isn't of interest to the
	entire net, you can edit this line.

Other headers are supported.  In addition, any unsupported header is
passed thorough unchanged if it does not appear to be a misspelling of
a supported header.

Although postnm will read from its standard input if no file is given,
typing an article directly into postnm from the terminal is
expressly frowned upon because that mode of operation makes it
difficult to correct errors.  Therefore, postnm will not save the
article in dead.article if an error occurs.
				Kenneth Almquist
