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No postnews or other Usenet news utilities?


Hello,
 
Though I am an experienced Unix user (and former admin), I am a relatively
new Cygwin user, so this may be a newbie question.  I swear I did my due
diligence, and am surprised this issue has not been raised in the mailing
list archives. (At least, not that I could find.)
 
First, a little background.  I am currently selling some rare Pokemon cards
on eBay ... this is an item that has universal appeal.  So, I'd like to
advertise my sale in all of the *.forsale Usenet newsgroups, including all
the regional groups.  (Whether or not my ads would be considered spam is
another issue and is debatable, since I'm not indiscriminately posting to
all newsgroups, but to appropriately selected groups.) For a newsreader, I'm
currently using Xnews on Windows (God, please give me a job where I don't
have to use Windows! :).  Wow - there must be *hundreds* of *.forsale
groups!
 
Anyway, Xnews has an arbitrary limit on cross posting to 20 groups at a
time.  Yesterday, I spent quite a bit of time going through all the
*.forsale groups, selecting 20 at a time, excluding item specific ones (like
computers or homes) and sending my ad.  It took quite a bit of time and was
insanely repetitive.  Imagine my surprise when I used Google Groups today to
search Usenet, only to find that my articles never made it out!  <ARRGH!>
 
The only thing I can think of is that the NNTP server I used has a cross
posting limit, too, of likely less than 20 groups.  If so, Xnews never let
me know that it got any error responses from the server, and I didn't pay
attention to the Xnews server status line as I was doing all this posting.
 
"No problem," I thought.  "I'll just go to Cygwin and use postnews."  I
always go to Cygwin whenever I want to use vi, do some simple text
processing, I'm feeling nostalgic for my good ol' days of using Unix on a
daily basis, or I'm simply pining to see that bash shell prompt just one
more time <sigh>.  I always go to Cygwin whenever there's something I want
to do that Windows is just too brain dead to handle. (And, none of these
things are terribly complicated things either.  A *pox* on Microsoft! I'd
rather be at home on my Mac! But, I've been working a lot of OT ... :)
 
So, I fire up my bash shell and look around at my Cygwin setup.  Huh - no
postnews.  Huh - no newsreader.  Huh - I'll have to run Cygwin setup and get
these things.  Huh?!  What?! No postnews?  nntpd?  No newsreaders but tin?!
No other Usenet utilities?  What the f ... ?!
 
Okay, maybe tin will be my savior, if it has a command line mode that will
let me post an article.  Then, I can write a script around it and automate
my postings, one group at a time, so I'm not cross posting at all.  So, I
download and install tin.  But, but ... yeah, tin has a "batch" mode - but,
that only lets me check to see if there's any new news or not - it has no
command line post mode!
 
<BIG SIGH!>  So, all of this leads to my Cygwin question(s): Am I just being
blind, or are there truly no Usenet utilities available for Cygwin?  If not,
are there any plans to add them in the future?
 
Thanks for your time, and apologies for being so long winded.  Take care and
God bless.
 
-------------------------------------------
<>< Bruce Wehr
    bruce@wehrhere.com




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