What Mail2News Is and Why to Use It
Normally, if you're posting to a newsgroup from WebTV, you either
use Post or Respond from Discuss. You can also submit posts to
newsgroups from e-mail. There are several reasons you might want
to do this:
- You can forward things you have in e-mail to the newsgroup.
- You can forward a post from one newsgroup to another (while
viewing a post, hit Send, write the post you want to have appear
above the forwarded post, and send it to the other group).
- You can keep a copy of the post you submit this way (after
you post through mail, click Storage, click Sent, and Save the
sent copy to Saved mail).
- You can post from any e-mail account you have, including
Hotmail, Mailexcite, Yahoo, GeoCities, etc.
If you're only interested in keeping a copy of your posts and
being able to post from a non-WebTV e-mail account, you may be
better off registering and posting through Deja News; to find out
more about this, click here.
How It Works
There are several e-mail–to–news gateways on the Internet, the
one I'm going to describe is at MIT in Massachusetts. When the
address you send to receives an e-mail, it reads the address and
follows the information you supply to direct the message to a
newsgroup as a post. This is the format of the address:
mail2news-YYYYMMDD-groupname@anon.lcs.mit.edu
YYYYMMDD is the date you're submitting the post,
if the current date is March 21, 1998, this part of the e-mail
address would be 19980321.
groupname is the name of the Usenet group you're
posting to, for instance rec.pets.cats or
alt.discuss.improve.webtv.
It used to be necessary to crosspost to alt.test when
posting to alt.discuss groups, but anon.lcs.mit.edu's
mail2news gateway now recognizes these groups–you can post
directly to alt.discuss groups.
Things to Consider when using Mail2News
Before posting to any Usenet newsgroup, you should take
the time to "lurk" for several days, reading a lot of the posts
there. Get a feel for how the group works, who the "regular"
posters are, what the general topics are, and think about what
you intend to contribute to the group within this context. If
possible, locate the FAQ for the group (Frequently Asked
Questions; these documents usually tell something of the history
and "rules" for the group). If you don't take the time to do
these things, you might find that your posts aren't received well
by the people already posting there.
In particular, you may find that some groups don't like people
using Mail2News gateways to post in their group. It's worth your
asking the group about this in a brief post done in a
regular newsgroup post.
A final note: Don't post mail you receive from other people
without their approval in advance. E-mail communications are
private, unless you have permission (if you're being harassed,
you should report it).
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