News2Remail (personal version) http://www.cotse.net/news2remail/ News2Remail is a NNTP to remailer proxy. It gives you the ability to transparently use the mixmaster remailers from within your choice of usenet client. Reading, posting, and replying as normal. All reading being served by your NSP and all replies and posts being sent out through the mixmaster remailer network. This version is for Windows. It is distributed as a stand alone executable along with the source code. It is written in Perl and compiled with ActiveState PerlApp. Requirements: - Mixmaster must be already installed, configured, and able to send. - You must be able to download and unzip a file, edit a text file, run an exe, and configure a news client as well. Of course if you have mixmaster running, you probably can. Important: No support is provided with this program for anyone not a subscriber to Cotse.Net services. To be honest, there shouldn't be any support needed, but someone will always have problems. We'd love to help, but we are already busy supporting our subscribers, so we must limit this. I'm sure someone will be able to help in the newsgroups. Of course we do want to know about, and will fix, any bug reports. News2Remail is in no way a replacement for programs such as Quicksilver (http://www.quicksilvermail.net) or JBN (Don't know where that is, use google). These programs are full featured clients. News2Remail is just an easy way to read and reply to usenet posts using the remailers. To use: - Simply unzip to a directory of your choice. - Edit the configuration file (news2remail.conf.sample) to suit your settings and save it as news2remail.conf. - Run news2remail.exe - Configure your news client so that the settings for news server read 127.0.0.1 and your news2remail configured port. - Enter any authentication settings your news server may need. - Then go about your usenet thing as normal, with all replies and posts being sent out through the mixmaster remailer network. On-The-Fly Settings: News2Remail accepts certain on-the-fly settings. By including, as headers or as the first lines in the body, key headers, you can over ride default settings in the configuration file for that message. Currently supported are: X-Chain: X-m2n: X-Custom: X-Chain - use this to set your chain and copies to be different then the default for any particular message. An example header or first line of the body would read: X-Chain: *,*,twisty; copies=5 The key is X-Chain: followed by the new chain. You must use proper remailer names or mixmaster will error and not send. X-m2n - use this to set a a different mail2news gateway then default for any particular message. An example header or first line of the body would read: X-m2n: mail2news@dizum.com The key is X-m2n: followed by the new gateway. If you enter an invalid gateway your post may be lost. X-Custom - use this to set any custom headers you may want. For use with clients that don't allow you to set headers. Not for use with on-the-fly settings for this program. Please note that custom headers are added as hash headers. Examples of these would be: X-Custom: X-MyHeader: This is my custom header X-Custom: X-AnotherHeader: This is another header added X-Custom: X-yetanother: Yup, another The key is X-Custom: followed by the custom header. If you mess these up I really don't know what will happen, just don't. None of the header keys are case sensitive. Command line switches: The following command line switches are available: -help (prints out switches) -stats (updates stats and exits) -updatestats (updates stats and loads) -installmix (future addition) More configuration options will be found within the file news2remail.conf.sample. Limitations and known issues Some Blocking: Although it uses select to juggle connections and avoid blocking, blocking will still happen in some circumstances. Because it is also juggling a news server connection per incoming connection, some choices were made. Rather than have this cycle the news connections too and use loads of cpu, the full news send is processed before moving on. This increases speed and decreases load, but in return for some blocking. What this means to the non-technical is that you will be unable to read and reply while downloading, for instance. But you should probably be running a different copy of your news client that is connecting directly to the news server if downloading, anyway. Downloading headers is something else that will cause other connections to be "put on hold" until the headers finish. There may be other things affected as well. It is quite unusable in a multi-user environment as a result but will be fine for single user use. Most things will cycle fast enough that you won't even notice delays with multi-connection clients. Single connection clients will not be affected. News server timeouts: Because I can find no RFC standard for timeout error codes, the way it handles time out from the news server is keyed to the words. This may cause issues with foreign language servers. In this instance news2remail will not recognize that the news server has timed out the connection. The news2remail program may need to be stopped and restarted in this instance. Please notify me with the details if you run into this. Directories and filenames: Directories and files must not contain spaces. This means neither the path to mixmaster, nor news2remail, nor any related files may contain spaces. NNTPS: You'll have to use stunnel to encrypt the connection from news2remail to your news server for reading if you want that encrypted. Flooding: News2Remail is designed to exit if you flood. IMPORTANT News Clients: Your news client likely keeps a copy of sent posts. This is written to disk. In order for complete security you must look to proper deletion and disk scrubbing to remove any traces of those saved posts. This program is not recommended in instances where local disk write issues are of concern because of this behavior of the news clients. Headers: It passes most headers. Make sure you test post first by setting debug=yes in the conf. Then it will post to the filename instead of to mixmaster. Add any headers you need stripped to the conf. When satisfied, set debug=no and use. Outing yourself: You can easily forget this is there. If you forget and sign a post with your real name, signature, or other identifying characteristics, you will out yourself. Remain aware.