Relcom News Mailserver
Our thanks to Mikhail Fridberg who made this
information available via a posting to the RusTex listserver.
Relcom has a mail distribution service that everyone can subscribe to. It
is not a listserve, since it uses different commands. Anyway, here it is:
the name is
news@kiae.su
Here is help file that kiae.su newsserver sends upon request:
Relcom & Usenet News mailserver.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This automatic mail server relays news articles from Relcom and USENET via
usual E-mail. If you want to use server you should send e-mail letter
containing the list of commands to the address news@kiae.su.
Subject is ignored. Command name can be in upper or lower case,
all other arguments are case sensitive.
Here comes brief description of available commands:
HELP Send this file. All subsequent commands are ignored.
LIST Give the list of all news groups with
brief description.
LIST hierarchy Give the list of news groups from the given hierarchy.
For example, "list comp.sources".
SUBSCRIBE group Subscribe to group in notify mode. Server will
periodically send you a list of commands to retrieve
new articles in the following format:
GROUP news.answers
-ART 100 size author subject
In order to get the articles you interested in
simply uncomment corresponding commands and send it
back to server. Don't remove GROUP commands!
FEED group Subscribe to group in feed mode. All new articles
from a group will be immediately sent to you.
WARNING:
Never use feed mode if you're not completely sure
that you need *all* articles and your e-mail
connection is stable and permanent. This mode can
easily cause e-mail traffic jams making impossible
to send or receive any electronic mail at your machine.
This can result in disconnecting your machine from net
by some administrator, so be careful.
RFEED size group Subscribe to group in restricted feed mode.
All articles smaller than given size (in kilobytes)
will be sent to you as in feed mode. Lists of bigger
articles will be sent to you as in notify mode.
UNSUBSCRIBE group Unsubscribe from group.
UNSUBSCRIBE all Unsubscribe from all groups.
FORGET If you were subscribed to some groups, and later
unsubscribed, server continues to send you
lists of newly created or deleted news groups,
hoping that you might get interested in them.
To finally unconnect from server give
command FORGET.
CHECK Show the list of groups you are subscribed to.
GROUP group Go to the group. This group becames "current"
(for commands ARTICLE, INDEX, LINDEX).
ARTICLE number Send specified article.
ARTICLE Send an article with specified message-id.
INDEX [number [number]] Show list of articles in current group.
The format of the list is the same as in subscribe mode.
Arguments specify the range of article numbers.
Negative agrument means 'LAST - number'.
INDEX - all articles
INDEX -20 - Last 20 articles
INDEX 700 750 - articles in range 700...750
LINDEX [number [number]] Show detailed list of articles in the following format:
Issue:
Subject:
From:
Date:
Message-ID:
Size:
PACK Enable packing mode. All articles sent to you
will be packed, compressed and encoded.
This will reduce the volume and the total number
of transmitted files. This mode is highly
recommended.
You should unpack received batches by one of the
special utilities UNBATCH, UUNPACK or use mailer
BML, which decodes batches on the fly.
You can get the UNBATCH program (with sources)
for MSDOS by command
SEND uunpack-dos
or for Unix 386
SEND unbatch-386
or for Xenix 286
SEND unbatch-286
If you need only sources of unpack programs
you can get them by
SEND unpack-src
and
SEND unbatch-src
PACK OFF Disable packing mode.
SEND Show list of files available on request.
You can get these files by command SEND with parameters.
SEND file Get a file. The following files are available:
unbatch-dos 29k program UNBATCH for MSDOS
unbatch-386 42k program UNBATCH for Unix 386
unbatch-286 38k program UNBATCH for Xenix 286
unbatch-src 20k sources of program UNBATCH
uunpack-dos 23k program UUNPACK for MSDOS
uunpack-286 29k program UUNPACK for Xenix 286
uunpack-src 8k sources of program UUNPACK
GSTAT [hierarchy] Get information about subscriptions on groups.
For each group is listed: name, number of articles
(approximately), and number of subscribers in
SUBSCRIBE, FEED and RFEED modes.
USTAT [address] Get information about user subscriptions.
User address is a regular expression in SH style.
For example, command "ustat alex@*" will print
information about users with name alex.
For each user is listed: name, total number of groups,
and number of subscriptions in SUBSCRIBE, FEED and
RFEED modes.
TIME Print current date and time.
AGING OFF Turn off aging of subscribers. Usially server
forget about silent user after 28 days of silence.
AGING Turn on aging if it was turned off previously.
QUIT Shows server that all commands are over.
WARNING: don't use user name "uucp" or "news" to receive news -
server ignores these names.
In order to submit an article you should send the article with the
header field "Newsgroups:" containing the comma-separated list of
newsgroups (all newsgroups should be valid) to the address news@kiae.su.
The default distribution of the message is the whole world, so you should
think twice before sending your article. Remember it will be read by
thousands or millions of readers around the world, so your message
should not be offensive, should not violate copyright laws. Never write
things already written by somebody. It's better to restrict distribution
area to be as small as possible. You can do it using
the header field "Distribution:". Valid distributions are:
world, eunet, su, russia, moscow
Example:
% mailx news@kiae.su
Subject: testing
~: headline Newsgroups relcom.test
(continue)
~: headline Distribution su
(continue)
Twas brilling...
.
EOT
%
Please send all questions to usenet@kiae.su.
Bug reports and propositions please send to Serge Vakulenko, vak@kiae.su.
Hope it can help someone who does'n have Relcom news available by newsreader.
Mike.