colobus is an nntp server, written in perl, that provides access to
mail archives in the ezmlm or mlmmj archive format.

basic installation instructions can be found in the INSTALL file.

the license (mit-style) can be found in the LICENSE file.

it uses the DBI perl module to maintain the overview database, so you'll need
to install that and the relevant DBD driver (only MySQL has been tested) if
they aren't already installed.

it uses the Mail::Address perl module (from MailTools) to parse mail
addresses and make them presentable to news clients (which have a
stricter requirement for the format of the From: header).

it implements all of rfc 977 (although it will always returns an empty
result for 'newnews' commands). it also ignores the 'distributions'
parameters on the 'newnews' and 'newgroups' commands.

it implements the extended 'list', 'mode reader', 'mode stream',
'xgtitle', 'xhdr', 'xpat', 'xpath', 'xover', and 'xrover' commands
from rfc 2980.

it implements a completely non-standard 'xthread id_or_msgid' command to get
the equivalent of 'xover' for messages in the same thread.

it implements a completely non-standard 'xversion' command to get the
version of the news server.

(the relevant rfc documents have been included in the distribution,
by the way.)

it supports posting by forwarding the post as an email to the list
addresses, with the envelope sender sent to the from address of the
news posting. it handles cross-posting by posting to each list
seperately. it adds an 'Received:' header that includes the ip address
of the poster, to help track evil-doers.

information about the black-and-white colobus can be found at 
http://www.selu.com/bio/PrimateGallery/PrimateWeek/Colobus/.

additionally, information about the red colobus can be found at
http://www.bioko.org/primates/pennanti.asp.

jim winstead <[email protected]>, may 2004
http://trainedmonkey.com/projects/colobus/