rfc1036 December 1987

4.2.  Transfer by Mail

    On some systems, direct remote spooled execution is not possible.
    However, most systems support electronic mail, and a news message
    can be sent as mail.  One approach is to send a mail message which
    is identical to the news message: the mail headers are the news
    headers, and the mail body is the news body.  By convention, this
    mail is sent to the user newsmail on the remote machine.

    One problem with this method is that it may not be possible to
    convince the mail system that the "From" line of the message is
    valid, since the mail message was generated by a program on a
    system different from the source of the news message.  Another
    problem is that error messages caused by the mail transmission
    would be sent to the originator of the news message, who has no
    control over news transmission between two cooperating hosts
    and does not know whom to contact.  Transmission error messages
    should be directed to a responsible contact person on the
    sending machine.

    A solution to this problem is to encapsulate the news message into a
    mail message, such that the entire message (headers and body) are
    part of the body of the mail message.  The convention here is that
    such mail is sent to user rnews on the remote system.  A mail
    message body is generated by prepending the letter N to each line of
    the news message, and then attaching whatever mail headers are
    convenient to generate.  The N's are attached to prevent any special
    lines in the news message from interfering with mail transmission,
    and to prevent any extra lines inserted by the mailer (headers,
    blank lines, etc.) from becoming part of the news message.  A
    program on the receiving machine receives mail to rnews, extracting
    the message itself and invoking the rnews program.  An example in
    this format might look like this:
      Date: Mon, 3 Jan 83 08:33:47 MST
      From: news@cbosgd.ATT.COM
      Subject: network news message
      To: rnews@npois.ATT.COM

      NPath: cbosgd!mhuxj!harpo!utah-cs!sask!derek
      NFrom: derek@sask.UUCP (Derek Andrew)
      NNewsgroups: misc.test
      NSubject: necessary test
      NMessage-ID: <176@sask.UUCP>
      NDate: Mon, 3 Jan 83 00:59:15 MST
      N
      NThis really is a test.  If anyone out there more than 6
      Nhops away would kindly confirm this note I would
      Nappreciate it.  We suspect that our news postings
      Nare not getting out into the world.
      N

    Using mail solves the spooling problem, since mail must always be
    spooled if the destination host is down.  However, it adds more
    overhead to the transmission process (to encapsulate and extract the
    message) and makes it harder for software to give different
    priorities to news and mail.