This is the README for News2mbox.1.4.NIHS.b.tar.gz [Download] [Browse] [Up]
Quick Summary This tool is designed to facilitate the archiving of News articles in Mail folders. Just grab an article icon from the Newsgrazer window and drag it to the main panel of this program. The primary newsgroup will be determined and the appropriate directories will be created as needed. The Archive Path setting determines the root of the archive. Removable media devices are supported: if the path does not exist, there will be an opportunity to retry after inserting the named disk. Crossposted articles are handled so as to prevent multiple archive locations whenever possible. NNTP News support may not be as good as with C-News. Background This program came about because the temporary storage method for incoming News is not an efficient storage method for archiving the same articles. UseNet news is stored in separate files so that they can be easily deleted once they expire. NewsGrazer allows archiving of selected articles, but uses the same "one file per article" storage method. News2mbox is a solution which combines similar articles into a single file. Access of the archived articles is achieved by reusing Mail.app as a graphical front-end for reading messages. Main Window The main window is titled Drop a News file on this window and that is what you should do. If you pause over the main window with the mouse button held down, the file will be scanned to verify that it is a news article. The Newsgroups: header line and the article number will be displayed or an error message will appear if you try to drag a bogus file from the File Viewer. If you don't pause, the scanning will still happen, so there is no need to slow down unless you want a chance to change your mind. mbox Means mailbox Once you drop the icon, News2mbox tries to find a mailbox to store it in. If the mailbox exists, then the article is appended, otherwise a new mailbox is created. When you want to access your archived news, just use the File Viewer and double-click on the <newsgroup>.mbox file to bring up a window in Mail.app (which you should already know how to use). Depending upon the settings in the Preferences Panel, the path to the mailbox can be determined from the newsgroup so that archives are maintained in a directory tree which mirrors the UseNet hierarchy. Removable Media The Archive Path setting in Preferences allows you to specify the root of the directory tree in which mailboxes are stored. You can enter the name of a removable disk, such as /OpticalDisk, and News2mbox will pop up an alert panel if it cannot find the path. Your options are to insert a disk and hit return to try again (after the operating system has mounted the disk); cancel the operation (the main window will be blank to show you that your article was not archived); or to force the root path to be created (in case you want the archive on your fixed disk or even if you want to be lazy and let News2mbox create the directories for you). Crossposted Articles News articles which have been crossposted are identified by a comma-separated list in the Newsgroups: line of the message header. In order to limit random creation of mailboxes for newsgroups which you do not read, News2mbox will append the article to the first newsgroup on the list for which there is an existing mailbox. If no mailbox exists, then you can specify whether to use the first newsgroup on the list or simply the current newsgroup you are reading (the latter is determined by the path name of the file you are dragging). This option is selected in the Preferences Panel under the group box titled Determine new Archive mailbox names from:. Single Archive destination supports the Mailboxes window of Mail.app If you would like all of the news articles to be archived in mailboxes in the same directory, then select the appropriate button in the Preferences Panel under Directory:. The default setting is Hierarchical, to cause News2mbox to duplicate the newsgroup hierarchy maintained by the UseNet news software. Selecting a Flat Archive Directory makes it possible to set the Archive Path to ~/Mailboxes so that Mail.app will find your archived newsgroups in its Mailboxes window. Just drag the window's size bar out large enough so that the longer filenames are visible. Status Feedback Once News2mbox has completed its task, the word Archived will appear to give you a warm feeling that you will be able to reference the article in the future. If News2mbox has just saved a crossposted article, you will see Archived in: <pathname> NewGrazer Postings Rich Postings made from NewsGrazer are preserved in the archived mailboxes, but you must use the NGService application to read them since Mail.app does not understand this format. NGService is available via anonymous ftp on sonata.cc.purdue.edu as NGService1.1.tar.Z. Credits I based the NeXTstep features of News2mbox on the Acceptor example source code by Jayson Adams, of the NeXT Developer Support Team, but I fixed a crashing bug where the code in IconView.m would allow you to attempt to drag an icon out of an empty well. This wasn't very useful since it crashed the Workspace, so now its fixed. The guts of the program originate from my own sweat and toil while trying to maintain compatibility between Jayson's NewsGrazer, C-News, Unix mail, and NeXT's Mail.app! Legal Stuff I am tired of legalese, so I will word the following in plain english. The language should be precise enough to avoid misunderstanding in the event that legal action is necessary. Please do not charge money for this utility or for any service you provide using this utility. Please do not remove my name from this Help file, the executable, or its associated user interface files. Please do not distribute modified versions of any of these files. I hold the copyrights for this utility and do not give permission for it to be distributed on CD-ROM without my prior written permission. For those of you who are compiling CD-ROM archives of software available freely via ftp, these restrictions are aimed directly at you - especially if you are planning to charge for the CD-ROM, but even if you are not. I would suggest keeping a copy of this Help file around to remind you not to forget about the restrictions I have placed on this free software. Future versions are not guaranteed to be free. There are no guarantees or warranties associated with this free software. You must accept it as is or else do without it. Contact: Brian Willoughby Sound Consulting (206) 865-0071 brianw@sounds.wa.com
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.