colobus

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colobus is an nntp server, written in perl, that provides access to mail archives in the ezmlm archive format.

basic installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.

the license (mit-style) can be found in the LICENSE file.

it uses the DBI perl module to maintain the overview database, so you'll need to install that and the relevant DBD driver (only MySQL has been tested) if they aren't already installed.

it uses the Mail::Address perl module (from MailTools) to parse mail addresses and make them presentable to news clients (which have a stricter requirement for the format of the From: header).

it implements all of rfc 977 (although it will always returns an empty result for 'newnews' commands). it also ignores the 'distributions' parameters on the 'newnews' and 'newgroups' commands.

it implements the extended 'list', 'mode reader', 'mode stream', 'xgtitle', 'xhdr', 'xpat', 'xpath', 'xover', and 'xrover' commands from rfc 2980.

it implements a completely non-standard 'xversion' command to get the version of the news server.

(the relevant rfc documents have been included in the distribution, by the way.)

it supports posting by forwarding the post as an email to the list addresses, with the envelope sender sent to the from address of the news posting. it handles cross-posting by posting to each list seperately. it adds an 'Received:' header that includes the ip address of the poster, to help track evil-doers.

information about the black-and-white colobus can be found at http://www.selu.com/bio/PrimateGallery/PrimateWeek/Colobus/.

additionally, information about the red colobus can be found at http://www.bioko.org/primates/pennanti.asp.

jim winstead [email protected], may 2004 http://trainedmonkey.com/colobus/