5 Setting Up News as a Local Reader/Server

5.6 Setting up required mail addresses

5.6.1 Administrative contact address for News matters

Any site exchanging news in the Usenet hierarchies is required to route mail to the address usenet@site to the person responsible for managing news usage at that site. In effect, usenet@site is to news what postmaster@site is to mail. Even if you don't exchange news feeds with other sites, if users from your site post to network newsgroups, readers outside your organization may try to contact this address to report technical problems (e.g. the From: addresses in posts from your site are unreplyable) or breaches of netiquette (e.g. a user at your site is posting chain letters). You should create a mail forwarding address or define a system-wide logical name which will direct incoming mail with this address to the appropriate person. For instance, you can do this using VMS Mail's Set Forward command:
$ Mail
MAIL> Set Forward/User=USENET myaddr
MAIL> Exit

where myaddr is the valid mail address to which you want incoming messages to USENET directed.

5.6.2 Addresses for incoming news feeds

If you are accepting incoming news feeds by mail, when you make arrangements with the site that is feeding you, you will need to supply them with an address to which to mail the items they're sending you. Traditionally, this address has been either rnews@site or newsmail@site. If you are receiving feeds via mail, it will minimize confusion if you create mail forwarding addresses or define system-wide logical names to route mail to these addresses to a place where your periodic maintenance batch job will find the incoming items.

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