Hello all, As I have promised to some of you, and because I think it may be of interest to many others, here it goes!
"How to set up MailTraq4Free (http://www.mailtraq.com) to manage newsgroups from The Bat!" Before starting, two notes: - The procedure explained below assumes you have just installed MailTraq. If you have been fiddling with it trying to configure it without success, it may be worth un-stalling and starting from scratch. - Because I have a network and my own mail server, my actual configuration may be a little different. But I have written the procedure below as I was actually configuring MailTraq in a stand alone machine. Here we go. It is a long one: Install MailTraq in your system and, as soon as installation is complete, the "Getting Started Wizard" should automatically start. If you have MailTraq already installed, you can start the "Getting Started Wizard" from the Help menu, so do so now. 1.- Setting your Primary Domain Name This is done in Server Properties, which you can get to by clicking Server... in the Options menu Enter your domain, if you have one, or your ISP's (the @domain.com of one of your accounts) 2.- click on the LAN tab to move to Step 2. If you are not in a network, enter 127.0.0.* If you are, your are probably using 192.168.0.* for the IP addresses or your machines. 3.- Skip step 3. 4.- Skip step 4 (select last option of the wizard) 5.- Create a new user as per step 5 of wizard. (File/Create new user) A new wizard starts: - Create a new user in MailTraq and click NEXT - Use your account (user name) (maybe a fake one?) - Yes, create a mailbox for [EMAIL PROTECTED] and NEXT - Do NOT enable forwarding. NEXT. - Do not include any aliases. NEXT. - Finish 6.- I am assuming direct connection by DSL, cable, etc. Can't test dial up myself. So, Finish to finish the wizard. 7.- Select Options/server Properties and Online tab Select Direct/permanent connection (in my case, you may have to configure Dial Up) 8.- Select Options/News Select the News Servers tab. Click Add and add your news server(s) of choice. For example, I use "News.CIS.DFN.DE". On the News Server Properties enter News.CIS.DFN.DE Select "Retrieve a full list of newsgroups" if not selected by default. And maybe set up every how many minutes you do want to collect news from this server. On the Connection Properties tab, enter your UserID and password if required by your server of choice. Most ISP's news servers don't, but News.CIS.DFN.DE does require a user and password. Click OK. 9.- Back on the News Properties dialog, select the News Collection tab and select "News Collection Enabled". 10.- The NNTP client will probably start by itself in a few seconds to collect the list of newsgroups in the server. If it doesn't, Select Actions/Collect News. 11.- Once the NNTP Clients has finished (you can see this on MailTraq Console if you have "Active Connections" selected on the left pannel), select Options/Newsgroups: The News Groups Subscription dialog will open and, on the Groups on server tab you will see the complete tree (list) of newsgroups available on your server. - Select one from the list, or use the Search for window to for one you know about and click Find. Once the name of your desired groups is displayed below, (I suggest that for the first time, until your get everything working, you select a NOT TOO ACTIVE newsgroup from the ones you are familiar with.) When the desired group is displayed in the Found window, click Go To and it will be highlighted in the tree below. Click and the newsgroup and the Subscribe button on the right will be activated. Click on Subscribe and then on the Properties button below to open the group Properties. The Properties tab should be filled in by default. Select the Download tab and (for the first trial) select Override Default Properties. Select (tick) Ignore Articles older than ... a few days. 30, the default, may be too much. You may also want to set now the number of days the articles will be kept at your "local news server" (MailTraq). I have mine set to 2 days. A NOTE of caution here. the "Only download up to" XX "most recent articles per session" does not mean it will download the last XX articles. As far as I have seen, our of the articles that may be available NOT "older than NN days", it will download at most XX per session (or connection). And now, TWO VERY INPORTANT steps. Select the Mail gateway tab. Select (tick) Enable News to Mail gateway. Click on Add to enter the mailbox (or remote e-mail address) where you want news (as e-mail) delivered to. A new Properties dialog opens. In "E-Mail to post to" enter the user mailbox where you want news (e-mail) delivered). This should be [EMAIL PROTECTED], the one created in Step 5 of the "Getting Started Wizard" above. DO NOT change the value suggested in "To: field for messages", which should be of the form "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". This is the e-mail address you will have to send e-mail (new posts or replies) from TB!. Click OK. Select the News Gateway tab, and select (tick) Enable Mail to News Gateway. Click OK, and then Done on News Group Subscription dialog. We are almost done ;-) You can now wait until MailTraq connects to your news server to download messages (remember the time set in step 8) or, if you do not want to wait, from the Console menu select Actions/Collect News. If you have Active Connections selected on the left pane, you will see the activity on the right one. Once the connection and message download is finished, you will be able to see the downloaded messages in two different places: 1.- On the left pane of MailTraq's console, click and expand News, Subscriptions, Your news server, your newsgroup. The downloaded messages should be displayed on the right pane. 2.- Click and expand Mail, Mailboxes, your User mailbox. Downloaded messages should also be there, already converted to e-mail, and waiting for you to collect them with TB!. You are done with MailTraq, now let's go to TB! I suggest that, at least until you are more familiar with the whole thing, you do create a new account in TB! just to manage newsgroups. So: a.- Create a new account. For e-mail address, use "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", the one defined in step 5 of the initial wizard. Both for SMTP and POP servers enter the name of your system (PC) if you have one, or "localhost" or just 127.0.0.1 (I've used this last option). Click Next. On the next step, the Users should be pre-filled with the correct value. So, enter your password. And that is it. Select other account properties according to your preferences. b.- Collect your "news" for the first time. Select the new account on the account tree and Collect New Mail (or F2). Your news should now be in your Inbox. Correct? Now you can create a folder for this news group (and others you may want to join), set up filters to automatically send messages to the appropriate folder and create templates for each group. So, how do you post (send messages) to a news group?. You have to send an e-mail message form this account to the "To: field for messages" ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) defined when we were setting up the News to Mail gateway, and which appears is the To: field of the messages you have just received in your Inbox. What I have done when setting up the templates for each news group folder is to use: %TO="" %TO="%OTOADDR" macros for the replies, and %TO="[EMAIL PROTECTED]" for new messages. And that should do it, or at least I think so. Feel free to ask if you don't understand something or you have any problems, and I will do my best. -- Best regards, Miguel A. Urech (El Escorial - Spain) Using The Bat! v1.60c ________________________________________________________ Current Ver: 1.60c FAQ : http://faq.thebat.dutaint.com Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archives : http://tbudl.thebat.dutaint.com Moderators : mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TBTech List: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
