HELP VED_POSTNEWS                                    A.Sloman March 1989
                                                Revised J.Meyer Nov 1989
                                     Revised for Bham, A.Sloman Nov 1996
                                   Revised for new Version A.S. May 2001
                                 Revised for package system: 16 Jan 2005

LIB VED_POSTNEWS

To make these facilities available give the following pop11 command

    uses vedgn

This file describes facilities for preparing a new file before sending
news, using Unix news posting mechanisms, and also posting the file.

The main facility for posting news files after they have been prepared
in the correct format is described in HELP VED_GN. The command
    ENTER gn p
or
    ENTER gn post

will post the file.

The command
    ENTER postnews

has been defined to be equivalent to the above.
(Previously it required that you had access to the
"inews" program. That is no longer generally available.)

LIB VED_GN is available for reading news. (See HELP VED_GN)

-- Summary of facilities ----------------------------------------------

<ENTER> postnews
    Either - prepare header for news file
    OR -  send current file as news, if the header is already there.

<ENTER> postnews new
    Creates a temporary file with a prepared news header.

<ENTER> postnews cancel
    If done while reading a news article will send a cancel message
    for that article, which should have been posted by you.
    [NO LONGER WORKS]

<ENTER> followup
    Followup to a news article
    This prepares a new file containing appropriate headers, and a copy
    of the original article indented, which you can edit in order to
    prepare your reply, then post using "ENTER gn p", or
    ENTER postnews

<ENTER> followup reply
    Prepare a reply to sender of a news article. You can post it using
    ENTER send, as described in HELP SEND

         CONTENTS - (Use <ENTER> g to access required sections)

 -- Summary of facilities
 -- Preconditions
 -- <ENTER> postnews
 -- Inserting the header
 -- Sending the message
 -- Adding a "signature" at the end
 -- Reading news
 -- <ENTER> followup [reply] (followup or reply to a news article)
 -- Acknowledgement

-- Preconditions ------------------------------------------------------

You should have set your unix environment variable $NNTPSERVER
E.g. this may be something like
    news.cs.bham.ac.uk

It may be set in your .login or .profile file. E.g.

In .login
        setenv NNTPSERVER news.cs.bham.ac.uk

In .profile

        NNTPSERVER=news.cs.bham.ac.uk
        export NNTPSERVER

-- <ENTER> postnews ---------------------------------------------------

Does one of two things.
    If there is no appropriate header at the top of the file it inserts
        one.
    If there is one already, it sends the file as news.

So it is typically used twice on every file, once to insert the header
and then once to send the news.

-- Inserting the header -----------------------------------------------

If the argument "new" is given to postnews (ie. <ENTER> postnews new), or the
first line of the current file does not start with one of
    Subject:
    Newsgroups:
    References:
    Distribution:

then it inserts a number of header lines at the top of the current VED
buffer, i.e.

    Subject:
    Newsgroups:     (e.g. local.test, uk.ikbs)
    Distribution:   (e.g. local, uk, eunet, world)
    Keywords:
    From:   (your email address)


You then edit out the parenthesised portions and insert whatever is
needed.

For a list of permissible news groups
    ENTER
        consult your .newsrc file
        (assuming that it has been set up correctly)

    OR
        use the "ENTER gn a" command
        This will give you a list of currently active groups on your
        server. WARNING: there may be thousands of them.

See also
    HELP VED_GN_SETUP
This shows you a convenient way to set up your .newsrc file.

-- Sending the message ------------------------------------------------

When the header is ready, you can give one of these commands (they are
all equivalent):

    <ENTER> gn post
    <ENTER> gn p
    <ENTER> postnews

If all goes well the article will be posted and you will get some
information about it in a temporary Ved buffer.


-- Adding a "signature" at the end ------------------------------------

See HELP ved_gn/signature for information on getting your signature
file appended automatically to posted news articles.

Do not attempt to post messages with signatures that are more than four
or five lines long. You will merely annoy recipients.


-- Reading news -------------------------------------------------------

The VED command <ENTER> gn can be used to read news on some machines, if
you have a .newsrc file in the appropriate format. See HELP * VED_GN
for details.


-- <ENTER> followup [reply] (followup or reply to a news article) -----

If you use '<ENTER> gn' to read an article and you wish to send a
followup article to the same news groups, you can use the
    <ENTER> followup

command to prepare your followup article with appropriate headers.

Note that if the news-header includes a line starting

    Followup-To: <news groups>

then the news groups listed will be used for the "followup" rather than
the original news groups.

You can then use '<ENTER> postnews' to send the article when you have
finished editing the reply.

If you wish to reply only to the sender use
    <ENTER> followup reply

Then use <ENTER> send to send the message.

See HELP SEND

At Birmingham see TEACH EMAIL


-- Acknowledgement ----------------------------------------------------

The design of this package made considerable use of suggestions from
Leila Burrell-Davies.

Jonathan Meyer suggested the "<ENTER> postnews new" option


--- $poplocal/local/help/ved_postnews
--- Copyright University of Sussex 1989. All rights reserved. ----------

--- $poplocal/local/help/ved_postnews
--- Copyright University of Birmingham 2001. All rights reserved. ------
