OmniMix • Tutorial • Remailing • Sending News

From the user's point of view news messages are treated nearly similar to mail with one difference. As the remailer network is designed for mail, not all remailers are prepared to deliver to newsgroups. That's why so-called mail2news gateways have to come into play. The exit remailer sends the concerning message to such a gateway, which then posts it to the specified newsgroup within the Usenet. I recommend to make that way imperative by checking the 'M2N Gateway' switch and setting the mail address accordingly (the predefined gateways like dizum at 'mail2news@dizum.com' are very reliable). The declaration of several gateways, separated by commas, will further increase the chance of delivery.

In the past there have been incidents of message modification resp. censorship at the mail2news gateway, which is a childish behaviour, as such interventions are easy to recognize by the sender and made public within a short period of time. So it is relatively safe to give such a misguided operator a second chance on the assumption, that s/he may have learned the lessons from the reaction to such a lapse and behave correctly in the future.

By way of contrast communication by mail doesn't allow the originator to inspect the delivered data. That's why precautions have to be taken, which either prevent from modifying the data or allow the recipient to recognize any alteration. The appropriate methods are encryption and signing.

For whatever reason not all news servers are part of the Usenet. There are a few special interest servers, which have to be contacted directly. Fortunately some mail2news gateways allow to post to them as well, as long as you give them the necessary connection parameters within the header of your message. But bear in mind, that anonymous posting through remailers only makes sense, if there either are no access restrictions at all, or the server is secured by a commonly available collective username / password combination. Using individual login data would not only hand over sensitive data to strangers, but make you recognizable and thus reduce the whole process to absurdity.

Here's a message coming from a news client intended to be sent to the isolated fictious 'BoreBand' news server, which requires authentication (the 'O-...' directives in this example are explained later):

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From: John Doe <john.doe@domain.net>
Newsgroups: band.records
Subject: Re: Just another boring disc
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:04:37 -0500
Message-ID: <3e8pj2t7c3iosv2j6nud9igneu5515bi0s@xyz.com>
References: <5d317dw1h080n82ak894r25nwlb86sca@somewhere.not> <nIx4G.1946$xs.3148@by2nw0c6>
X-Newsreader: NoGood/16
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
O-Anon-From: None
O-Anon-Send: Yes
O-Remailer-Chain: 0 0 0 dingo
O-Remailer-Copies: 6
O-Newsgate-Active: Yes
O-Newsgate-Address: mail2news@newsanon.org
X-Newsserver: newsgroups.boreband.com:119
X-Newsauth: boreband:boreband

Pete Meager <pete.meager@billboard.invalid> - Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:17:35 -0000:
>Great music!

Pardon?
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The mail2news servers, which currently support this functionality are 'mail2news@m2n.mixmin.net' and 'mail2news@newsanon.org'. With the first mentioned only allowing to access free servers ('X-Newsserver: server[:port]'), the latter also handles login parameters ('X-Newsauth: username:password').