How to Get Online 1996 Spring

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MacBiff v1.01 README file THIS RELEASE VERSION HAS CHANGES THAT WILL CAUSE OLDER CONFIGURATIONS TO DROP MAIL!!! PLEASE READ ALL OF THIS FILE AND MAKE THE NEEDED CHANGES TO UPDATE YOUR UN?X ACCOUNT SO THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. ©1994 the Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign and SigSoft (the Special Interest Group for Software Development), the UIUC Department of Computer Science, UIUC, and most likely a bunch of other people I don't know. ACM at UIUC RESERVES ALL DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS. Eudora® is a registered trademark of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. What is MacBiff / rbiff ? ------------------------- MacBiff/rbiff are two programs that will notify a Mac user when new email comes in on their UN?X account. The MacBiff/rbiff project started a few months ago as a new project idea at one of our weekly SigSoft meetings. "I want it so my Mac makes cools sounds when I get mail, just like all the other people with workstations on their desks" - Chris Trimble. And so a project was born. The two main features of MacBiff are: + Totally Passive Operation + Requires no permissions to set up Because most of the students here read mail off of UN?X boxes that are shared among many many users, we could not leave a deamon running on the UN?X machine (background processes are highly frowned upon) so we had to keep opperation totally passive. We didn't want to have to keep restarting rbiff every time a lab workstation crashed either. The resulting two programs allow a user to configure their UN?X account so that rbiff is only run when new mail comes in, and needs no special permissions to be setup or run. The basic idea is that when ever your UN?X account gets mail, it runs rbiff via a piped .forward file (don't worry if you don't know what that means). rbiff goes through your .rbiffrc file and sends out a message over the network to every computer listed. When MacBiff is running it sits and watchs the network for any messages. When one comes it can be configued to do a few different things including playing a noise. MacBiff requires System 7 & MacTCP. MacBiff is not designed as a mail reader, mailbox quere system, or anything more than just letting you know about new mail. There are many other programs avaliable for the Mac that are MUCH better. If you are looking for a way to read UN?X mail from a Macintosh I would personally suggest Eudora by Steve Dorner. Eudora v1.4 can be found on ftp.cso.uiuc.edu, and v2.0 is commerically avaliable from Qualcomm Inc. Mail eudora-info@qualcomm.com for more info. MacBiff is "donation-ware". If you think it is the way coolest thing you have ever seen, ACM@UIUC will happily take donations. You decide how much it is worth to you. On the other hand, if it crashes your server and you lose all your mail for the next 8 months, don't come to us... To find out more about ACM@UIUC feel free to mail acm@uiuc.edu. To get in touch with the developers with questions/comments/bugs/massive crashes, mail macbiff@uiuc.edu. How does it work ? ------------------ if you set up a .forword file with a pipe instead of an address your mail is piped through whatever program is in your .forward file. This means that you can put rbiff in your .forward file so that whenever mail comes it gets piped into rbiff. rbiff will extract the subject, and who the message was from. If you are running procmail or elm filter you an also have rbiff run after filtering. Once rbiff has the information from the mail that it needs, rbiff looks at your .rbiffrc file and sends a single UDP/IP message out to every host and port listed in the .rbiffrc file. If MacBiff is running it will pickup the UDP/IP packets and try to extract the information from the packet. It will then optionally filter the message and notify the user. Setting up MacBiff ------------------ MacBiff is just like any other Macintosh application. It requires about 50K worth of heap space, but will grab free memory from the system when it needs to for stuff like playing sounds. MacBiff stores user settings interally, so it need to be run from media that can be written to. To start it checking for mail, just run it. Menus: These are fairly obvious... (Apple): About MacBiff... Brings up the About Box. File: Preferences... Opens preference window. Review Mail... Opens mail message box. Dimmed if no new mail has come in. Quit Quits MacBiff Preference Box: Collect all incoming mail Collect mail only for <name> If the top choice is active, MacBiff will display messages for all mail. If the bottom choice is active, and a name is entered in the text box, only mail for that user is displayed and other mail is discarded. This is for use on Macs that may appear in the .rbiffrc of more than one user. Especially useful for Macs used by more than one person. Remember information about new mail Simply indicate new mail has arrived The top choice will allow you to look at critical information about the new mail via the "Review Mail..." menu item or the automatic option (below). The bottom option will cause MacBiff to do the new mail actions and then discare then mail information. New mail actions + Play Sound Plays the sound sellected from the pop-up menu to the right. The menu has all sounds in the System suitcase plus any in the MacBiff resource fork, for those hackers out there. + Show Icon in Menu Bar This will cause the MacBiff icon to flash in the application menu until you look at the new mail information. + Show Dialog Box Brings up a dialog box that says "You Have New Mail." + Tell Eudora to check mail Has MacBiff send an AppleEvent to Eudora whenever new mail comes in. This causes Eudora to check for new mail on your account. MacBiff will not launch Eudora, it must be running. If Eudora is not running, nothing is done. + Automatically Display New Mail Will cause MacBiff to automatically bring up the mail info window if there is mail info waiting to be read and the MacBiff application is brought to the forground. Port <number> This is used to set the port number that MacBiff looks at for message information. See a local network guru for more information. 4545 is the defalt port for both MacBiff and rbiff. MacBiff can only watch one port at a time. Mail Info window: Next Displays next message to come in Last Displays previous message to come in Clear All Clears all messages from MacBiff. This in no way effects the mail in your account. Clear Clears current message from MacBiff. Again, this in no way effects the mail in your account. Close Closes the mail info window. Can be opened with the "Review Mail..." menu item. If MacBiff has no messages left it will automatically close the mail info window. Note: the "Time" that is displayed in the mail info window is the time that the Mac got the new mail message, not the time the Email was sent. Setting up rbiff ---------------- This is a little more tricky. It is assumed that you know enough basic UN?X to get around and edit files. The basics of rbiff are these: <mail file> | rbiff Causes rbiff to read text in SMTP mail format from standard in and send new mail messages in the ~/.rbiffrc file. To get rbiff working the first thing you need to do is compile the rbiff.c program. Once you have gotten the rbiff.c file to your account you can compile it with the command: $ cc -o rbiff rbiff.c I have tested this under SunOS and it comiled under cc, gcc, and gcc -ansi without errors. It also compiled with cc on an SGI and RS/6000. Many of the beta testers have also compiled it on various computers without problems. Once you have the rbiff program, stick it somewhere useful. I keep it in a dir called bin in my home dir along with any other personal programs. Feel free to have a system admin put it somewhere more public if many users are using it. Next you need to set up a .rbiffrc file. This file must go in your home dir. The smallest .rbiffrc file is 3 lines long and is in the format: -=-=-=-=-=- <Full User Name> = Name MacBiff uses to filter mail <Account Name> = Reference name so you know what account to check <host name> <port #> = host name, and port to send message to. .... -=-=-=-=-=- One of mine looks something like this: -=-=-=-=-=- Jay Kreibich # # Account: # Work SGI accont # # Machine listngs: # acm2.cs.uiuc.edu 4545 # ACM development Mac # isr0283.urh.uiuc.edu 4545 # my computer in my dorm room # isr0324.urh.uiuc.edu 4545 # my PowerBook when it is at home # monet.beckman.uiuc.edu 4545 # a computer at work # homer.cs.uiuc.edu 4545 # my PowerBook when it is in the ACM office # -=-=-=-=-=- The first line is the name that MacBiff uses to filter with if you have it set to "Collect Mail Only For:". The account name is whatever you want it to be. This was added so that I can tell if the new mail was to my work account, CS account, or general student account. Last is a list of as many hosts as you want each with a port number. rbiff will go through each host and signal to them at the specific port. If you use IP addresses, things will go a little faster. Lines that begin with the char '#' are ignored. Last you need to set up a .forward file. The easiest is somthing like (including quotes): NOTE: THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM THE BETA VERSIONS!! -=-=-=-=-=- \jk, "| /home/users/jk/bin/rbiff" -=-=-=-=-=- The basic format would is this: -=-=-=-=-=- \<login>, "| <full path to rbiff>/rbiff" -=-=-=-=-=- See the "forward" man page for more details. The basic idea is that the first "address" you are asking the mail system to forward your mail to is yourself. The "\" tells the mail system to ignore the .forward file while sending the mail so that cycles can be avoided. The second "address" you want the mail sent to is the rbiff program as standard input. This will cause the rbiff program to be run once each time you get new. Because you are not running rbiff from a shell, it is a good idea to use the full path in your .forward file. Tips: + Mail yourself 2 or 3 test messages to make sure you are not losing mail, and that rbiff and MacBiff are set up right. + If you are using procmail or elm filter, be sure the mail gets to the mailbox somehow... rbiff will not write it to the incoming mailbox!!! Many Thanks Too: ---------------- Christian Rathke, for testing out 3 or 4 differnt versions and helping catch a few strange bugs. Steve Dorner, for giving me the answer to a bug that would have taken 5 or 6 weeks to find on my own. Also provided new versions of Eudora to run beta tests with and pointing out existing email protocols (which were not used... sorry!). Mike Brudenell, who sent me 6 or 7 patch files for rbiff. Too bad we ended up just trashing the whole program and rewriting it from the beginning-- again. Charley Kline, for giving new ideas on how to handle .forward files, and helping with early beta testing of v0.99. And, of course, the various ACM people around the office including Chris Trimble who came up with the idea, Joel Jones our master of all that is Mac, Frank "the" Beier for general support, Alan "is a" Braverman for the Cherry Coke and Simsons, Greg Brauer for the "message for you, sir" sound clip, Mike "the" DUFF our ACM chair, Amy Ryan for Elmo and interesting conversation, Jim Browne and Eric Johnson for their help with MacTCP and networking in general, and everyone else in SigSoft and ACM (especially Dan SIMMs) for putting up with me as I tested the program forcing them to listening to the "message for you, sir" sound clip at least 50 times a day and me run around the office yelling about how MacTCP crashed the machine again... ACM at UIUC ----------- ACM@UIUC is a Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois, Urbana - Champaign. We are a student organization open to undergrads and grad students interested in anything that has to do with computers. A majority of our membership are CS and ECE majors, but there are everything from English to Bio majors here too. Our current membership is ~160 students. ACM@UIUC puts out a semi-monthly newsletter, _The Banks of the Boneyard_, with an average distribution of 1000 copies. Each of our 11+ SIGs, or Special Interest Groups meets (usually) weekly to discuss projects and ideas related to the topic of the SIG-- anything from SigMusic to SigVR. For more information on ACM@UIUC, mail acm@uiuc.edu. Other sources of information include our WWW server "http://sleepless.cs.uiuc.edu" and our anonymous FTP site, ftp.cso.uiuc.edu, /ACM. Development ----------- MacBiff was developed on ACM@UIUC's main Mac Development machine, a 2 headed Quadra 700 20/100 running 7.1 and MacTCP 1.1.1 and 2.0.4. It was written with THINK C 6.01. The UN?X side of things, rbiff, was written at the Department of Computer Science (at UIUC) Instructional Lab, using SPARCstation IPXs running SunOS 4.1.2. There has been talk about writing a Windoze client for PCs, but I'm not the one to do it. If you are interested in such a program feel free to mail macbiff@uiuc.edu. Version History --------------- v0.3 - First released named version. Avaliable only through email requests with limited public distribution. Leaked memory and had a very poor interface. v0.6 - Total interface re-rewrite from v0.6. Much more configurable and much more friendly to the user. Not released to the public. v0.9 - Fixed memory leak that would happen if the Mac was slammed by invalid packets. Had fun testing this one. Not released to the public. v0.99 - Added optional AppleEvents so that MacBiff could tell Eudora to check for incoming mail. Not released to the public. v1.0 - Finished the About Box, Docs, and released. Found two major bugs within a few days, release canceled on FTP sites, but still avaliable though email requests. v1.01 - Fixed MDEF bug that caused crashes on Mac II's and IIx's. Refined AppleEvent code so that it actually works.