news2mail - a bi-directional Usenet/Email gateway

Usenet has a bad reputation for being full of spam and idiots, but this is no longer really justified.  Most of the spam is dealt with by automatic cancelbots and the current crop of idiots don't know about it because as far as they're concerned, if it isn't Teh Web then it doesn't exist.  So the only thing that sucks about Usenet these days is the dreadful client software.  With a good client, Usenet becomes a great place to discuss any topic and make friends.

That's why I wrote news2mail and its companion mail2news.  They are perl scripts which speak sufficient subsets of NNTP and SMTP to make Usenet available in your mail client and enable posting to Usenet as if it were a mailing list.  You can then use mutt, the One True Email Client, to read and write Usenet.  Hooray.