FT> I have written a convertor from PKT to UUCP/SOUP and back.
 FT> It is possible to use the UUCP version with sendmail.  However, I
 FT> would like to write directly to the mqueue directory created during
 FT> the  ultimail install in the IAK with warp 3.0. 

Why ?  That's entirely the reverse direction to the one that you should be
going in.  The format of the queue directory maintained by the MTS on your
local host isn't any of your business, really.  This is especially so if
you have a MTS daemon running at the time, since you don't know how much
state information is maintained internally within the daemon, and what
interlocking protocol there is to prevent race conditions when updating the
queue directory.

Write your program to submit its messages by talking SMTP to a TCP socket
on port 25, and to complain to the user if there's nothing listening on
that port.

That way you won't ever need to worry about the MTS's local queue storage
mechanism, its interlocking, or the state of the daemon.  Nor will you,
indeed, have to worry about locating it (hint: the mail queue location is
configurable on OS/2 -- try working out how _sendmail_ locates it, and then
consider how you are going to determine what configuration file the current
sendmail daemon is using, since you cannot obtain that information in the
general case).

Nor will you have trouble talking to an RFC821 Mail Transport Service on
systems such as mine, which don't use or run sendmail for OS/2, but do,
nevertheless, have an SMTP daemon that you can send RFC822 messages to.

 FT> 3) does anyone know whether sendmail works with newsgroups messages
 FT> as well as private mail ? (using the -t switch ?)

Usenet messages are not necessarily interchanged by an RFC821 transport
layer.  Unlike FIDONET, which has common mechanisms and protocols, Usenet
and the Internet make a strong distinction between "news" and
"mail", and in the general case these two rarely meet, either in
the User Agents or the Message Transport Service.

"Batching" of newsgroup messages into an RFC822 message,
addressed to "inews" or some other local ID at a news server site
is rare, and certainly isn't a common standard for delivering news to
arbitrary hosts.  Again, if you want to submit Usenet messages, then
compose them in RFC1036 format and use NNTP to submit them to an NNTP
server.  

Note that the transmission of news is highly dependent from the news server
you are talking to.  Like FIDONET, how two sites exchange messages on
Usenet is immaterial to the rest of the net.  It's the format of the
messages themselves that is highly standardised.  Two Usenet sites could
use UUX to "rnews", batch SMTP, or NNTP, or anything else they
liked.  

Also note that although you can pretty much guarantee that if a site
handles mail it will have a server daemon that is prepared to talk SMTP on
port 25 to _anyone_, NNTP servers generally only talk to "known"
clients (either because the NNTP service is commercial, or simply for
security).

 ¯ JdeBP ®

--- FleetStreet 1.16 NR