Submitted for your approval:

I've been working with a person on BITnet to develop a reliable email based
transport method for news that would survive internet<->bitnet gateway abuse.
We've been running it for about a week now with no problems. The enclosed
VMS_SHARE file has all the changes.

This transport method is similar to the existing MAIL method, but the news
batches are uuencoded. They are decoded at the remote end and added to news. The
encoding and decoding programs are customized for this task for several
reasons.

Differences from standard uuencode/uudecode:

1) A character table to reverse any translations that may have happened along
the way. This is a common enhancement to uuencode. It was part of the version we
started with (EMBL uue/uud see comments in the source).

2) The decoder can handle multiple encoded files in one input stream, so one
pass through a file produced by a mail extract will decode all the batches.
(Also a stock feature of EMBL uud.) A customization of this is that there is
only one output file. All the news batches are concatenated into one file.

3) The decoder ignores the file name in the encoded file for security reasons.
The file name is set by the newsuud program. The encoder does the same thing,
not that it matters much.

It turns out quite nicely that ANU News will ignore any encoded batches in its
input, since it won't recognize them as such. Thus it isn't neccessary to do
anything to remove these from the files passed to ANU News. Both the decoded
batch file (if any) and the original mailed file are fed to news. UUEMAIL feeds
thus coexist cleanly with regular MAIL feeds.

All the credit for this work goes to Foteos Macrides <MACRIDES@WFEB2.BITNET>,
who customized the encoding and decoding programs, as well as the newsskim.com
procedure. The enclosed VMS_SHARE file includes the following files:

$!       1. NEWSSKIM.CDIFF;1

Context diff between my newsskim.com before the changes, and my newsskim.com
now. Since I'm not running any specific standard version of newsskim.com, I
figured it would be easiest to see just the changes required to implement this
and not have to wade through irrelevant differences. I don't think there'll be
any trouble figuring out where to merge this stuff in.

$!       2. NEWSUUD.C;1
$!       3. NEWSUUDMAKE.COM;1
$!       4. NEWSUUE.C;1
$!       5. NEWSUUEMAKE.COM;1

Source and build procedures for the decoder and encoder respectively.
newsskim.com expects to find the executables in uucp_bin.

I didn't know whether to send this to Jamie or Mark, so I figured I'd put it
here and let you guys decide who does what with it.
--
Terry Poot <tp@mccall.com>                   The McCall Pattern Company
(uucp: ...!rutgers!depot!mccall!tp)          615 McCall Road
(800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041           Manhattan, KS 66502, USA