The usenet delivery agent is used to post messages to USENET newsgroups by means of the inews program. It is declared like this:

MAILER(`local')    define first
MAILER(`usenet')   define second

Note that the local delivery agent must be defined before you can define usenet. The preceding declaration causes any mail addresses that end in a literal .usenet to be sent via this delivery agent. This works for addresses that end in .usenet, and addresses that end in .usenet@$=w where the class $=w ($=w) contains all the names of the hosts that represent the local machine.

The user portion of the address that precedes the .usenet should be the name of the newsgroup to which you are posting, such as comp.mail.sendmail.usenet. The usenet delivery agent calls the inews program to deliver the posting to that newsgroup.

The defaults for the usenet delivery agent are shown in Table 20-15, along with the mc configuration macros used to alter those defaults.

The source for inews is available with the nntp program, which is available in many forms from various sites. Use your web browser to find a version suitable to your needs. One such site is http://www.isc.org/products/INN/.

These are the same folks who supply the BIND nameserver software.