Message 5.7 Manual. Node: News Headers

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3.4: News Headers

message-required-news-headers a list of header symbols. These headers will either be automatically generated, or, if that's impossible, they will be prompted for. The following symbols are valid:

From

This required header will be filled out with the result of the message-make-from function, which depends on the message-from-style, user-full-name, user-mail-address variables.

Subject

This required header will be prompted for if not present already.

Newsgroups

This required header says which newsgroups the article is to be posted to. If it isn't present already, it will be prompted for.

Organization

This optional header will be filled out depending on the message-user-organization variable. message-user-organization-file will be used if this variable is t. This variable can also be a string (in which case this string will be used), or it can be a function (which will be called with no parameters and should return a string to be used).

Lines

This optional header will be computed by Message.

Message-ID

This required header will be generated by Message. A unique ID will be created based on the date, time, user name and system name. Message will use mail-host-address as the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the machine if that variable is defined. If not, it will use system-name, which doesn't report a FQDN on some machines -- notably Suns.

X-Newsreader

This optional header will be filled out according to the message-newsreader local variable.

X-Mailer

This optional header will be filled out according to the message-mailer local variable, unless there already is an X-Newsreader header present.

In-Reply-To

This optional header is filled out using the Date and From header of the article being replied to.

Expires

This extremely optional header will be inserted according to the message-expires variable. It is highly deprecated and shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing.

Distribution

This optional header is filled out according to the message-distribution-function variable. It is a deprecated and much misunderstood header.

Path

This extremely optional header should probably never be used. However, some very old servers require that this header is present. message-user-path further controls how this Path header is to look. If it is nil, use the server name as the leaf node. If it is a string, use the string. If it is neither a string nor nil, use the user name only. However, it is highly unlikely that you should need to fiddle with this variable at all.

In addition, you can enter conses into this list. The car of this cons should be a symbol. This symbol's name is the name of the header, and the cdr can either be a string to be entered verbatim as the value of this header, or it can be a function to be called. This function should return a string to be inserted. For instance, if you want to insert Mime-Version: 1.0, you should enter (Mime-Version . "1.0") into the list. If you want to insert a funny quote, you could enter something like (X-Yow . yow) into the list. The function yow will then be called without any arguments.

If the list contains a cons where the car of the cons is optional, the cdr of this cons will only be inserted if it is non-nil.

Other variables for customizing outgoing news articles:

message-syntax-checks

Controls what syntax checks should not be performed on outgoing posts. To disable checking of long signatures, for instance, add 

(signature . disabled)

to this list.

Valid checks are:

subject-cmsg

Check the subject for commands.

sender Insert a new Sender header if the From header looks odd.
multiple-headers Check for the existence of multiple equal headers.
sendsys Check for the existence of version and sendsys commands.
message-id Check whether the Message-ID looks ok.
from Check whether the From header seems nice.
long-lines Check for too long lines.
control-chars Check for invalid characters.
size Check for excessive size.
new-text Check whether there is any new text in the messages.
signature Check the length of the signature.
approved Check whether the article has an Approved header, which is something only moderators should include.
empty Check whether the article is empty.
empty-headers Check whether any of the headers are empty.
existing-newsgroups Check whether the newsgroups mentioned in the Newsgroups and Followup-To headers exist.
valid-newsgroups Check whether the Newsgroups and Followup-to headers are valid syntactically.
repeated-newsgroups Check whether the Newsgroups and Followup-to headers contains repeated group names.
shorten-followup-to Check whether to add a Followup-to header to shorten the number of groups to post to.

All these conditions are checked by default.

message-ignored-news-headers

Regexp of headers to be removed before posting. The default is
`^NNTP-Posting-Host:\\|^Xref:\\|^[BGF]cc:\\|^Resent-Fcc:'.

message-default-news-headers

This string is inserted at the end of the headers in all message buffers that are initialized as news.

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