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GOPHER.DOC
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Internet Message Format
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1994-09-18
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9KB
Date: Saturday, 17-Sep-94 04:51 PM
From: Gopher \ Internet: (gophermail@calvin.edu)
To: Gary Bradford \ PRODIGY: (ABMM81A)
Subject: GopherMail Help
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
GopherMail is an unofficial service, and may disappear at any time.
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
About GopherMail
GopherMail is a gopher client that uses electronic mail to interact with the
user. Messages containing menus and gopher link information are mailed to
users in response to their requests. Users reply to these messages and
indicate which menu items they want. It lets people use Gopher without
requiring them to have an account directly on the Internet, because it
communicates through email messages instead of direct "live" network
connections.
Until now, Gopher could only be used by people with Mac's, PC's, NeXTs and
Suns, etc. which are "live" on the Internet, or through login accounts on
Internet machines. Gopher client programs would make a direct network
connection to the Gopher server on the host with the desired information,
anywhere on the Internet, anywhere in the world.
Thanks to the GopherMail program, most of the resources of Gopher are now
available to everyone with email-only access to the Internet. One estimate
says that there are more than 10 million people who are off the Internet,
but can reach it with email. Wow.
Getting Started
You can get started by sending mail to gopher@calvin.edu with any or no
subject and any or no message body. GopherMail will reply by sending you
it's main gopher menu. You then use your email program to reply to that
message, including it in the text of your reply. Mark which menu options
you want to follow-up by putting an "X" (or "x") anywhere near the
beginning of the line, before the menu numbers for those options.
From there you can just keep repeating the process, sending replies back to
gopher with the desired items marked with an X. To make it more efficient,
you could edit your replies so they contain just the gopher link infor-
mation for the items that you want. You'll find all the link information
after the menu, at the bottom of the menu messages that GopherMail sends to
you. Some items on gopher menus are database searches and college phone
books. To search for a particular name or keyword(s), you simply send them
on the "Subject:" line of the message in which you've Xed the phonebook or
WAIS database menu option.
Options
GopherMail's options include:
- Message splitting after a certain file size
- Menu splitting after a certain number of menu items
- Re-using links saved in a "Bookmarks" file
- Requesting the Gopher menu for a specific hostname
- Requesting this help file
- Selecting menu items using fewer keystrokes
- Requesting items from the Info-Mac Archive
- Requesting gopher items with their raw link information
Since many email gateways have size limits on email messages, it's possible
to split GopherMail output into several messages when it exceeds a certain
size. This can be done by specifying a maximum number of menu items to send
in one message, or by specifying a maximum size in bytes for text, HQX,
binary and sound files. There are a couple of ways to do this. The first
way is to put "Menu=50" and/or "Split=30000" (for example) in the
"Subject:" of your message when requesting gopher menus and/or files. This
would limit the output to 50 menu items per message, and would send files
in messages of approximately 30,000 bytes each, maximum.
The other way is to include these same instructions in the body of the
message, on separate lines. For example:
Split=25K You may have text after the "25K". The "K" or "k" becomes "000".
Menu=75 Yes, I know 1K = 1024, but it was easier to write this way.
Lines like these already appear in menu messages, you can find them after
the menu items and before the link information. They contain the default
values. You should edit these lines to contain the values that you want.
All subsequent menus will contain your preferred "Menu=" and "Split="
values. Setting these values to 0 (zero) has the effect of not splitting
messages at all. The default is to split menus after 100 items, and files
after 27,000 bytes. If "Split=" or "Menu=" appear in the Subject: of the
message, these will override the values set in the message body.
You can specify a different host when requesting a top level gopher menu by
placing a fully qualified domain name as the "Subject:" of your message
(such as gopher.micro.umn.edu). You can also specify a port other than the
default of 70 by placing it after a fully qualified domain name in the
subject (e.g. darth.sdsc.edu 800).
The most efficient way to use GopherMail is to mail just the link
information for one or several gopher items. You can build a type of
"bookmarks" file by saving the links that you want to use again. If you
mail just the link information for a gopher connection, GopherMail will
follow the link and mail you the output. Here's what you need:
Name=About GopherMail <- This is optional, it returns in the Subject:
Type=0 <- This is required, see below for a list of types.
Port=70 <- Port 70 is assumed, required only if different.
Path=0/gophermail <- This is usually required, depends on the link.
Host=gopher.calvin.edu <- Required. This MUST be the last line of the
link.
Supported Types are:
0 -- Text File
1 -- Directory
2 -- CSO name server
4 -- Mac HQX file.
7 -- Full Text Index (these are often WAIS database searches)
9 -- Binary File
s -- Sound
Binary and Sound Files are sent as uuencoded files.
If you send the word "help" as the subject (no quotes), GopherMail will send
you this help file.
To save a few keystrokes, instead of putting X's in front of the menu lines,
you could also just insert lines at the top of the reply which contain an
"X" followed by the menu number that you want, such as: x3
X15
Macintosh Programs and other files uploaded to the Info-Mac Archives on
Sumex at Stanford can be easily requested through GopherMail. Just send
mail to gopher with the complete "Archived as" line for each file, such as:
[Archived as /info-mac/dir/file-name.hqx; 400K] GopherMail will recognize
these as Info-Mac requests, and retrieve them from the gopher server on
sumex-aim.stanford.edu. Since mail programs like Eudora can automatically
de-binhex only complete HQX files, the default for Info-Mac files is not to
split them into parts. This can easily be overridden by supplying a "Split="
value on the Subject: line.
GopherMail also recognizes gopher link information in "raw" form, which
means tab-delimited on one line. A typical link might look like:
0About GopherMail#0/gophermail#gopher.calvin.edu#70
The "#" marks represent tab characters. This may not seem very useful, but
it allows you to copy a link from a program like GopherApp and paste it into
a message to gopher for processing by GopherMail.
Why GopherMail?
I was afraid that after leaving my job at Calvin in 1993, I might not be
able to get an account which has direct "live" access to the Internet, and
therefore have no more cool gopher access. I expect that no matter where I
live, I'll manage to at least find a service (free, cheap, or commercial)
that will let me send email to Internet addresses. My GopherMail program
lives on an Internet computer, such as this Sun at Calvin where it started,
or the computers at U of Minn, or maybe someday on every gopher server on
the net, and it accepts email requests from anyone, on or off the Internet.
It makes the gopher connections on the Internet, then it emails the results
back to the person who requested them, to whatever their email address is.
Credits
GopherMail was written in Perl by Fred Bremmer in September 1992. Nick
Hengeveld helped with the TCP portion, and Matt Ranney provided the book on
Perl and helped with some regular expressions. Several friends helped to
find bugs and suggest improvements.
For help, to report bugs, or for more information, send email to
gophermail-admin@calvin.edu