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The SOUP system type

When registering a new system, you may set the Type to SOUP. SOUP is short for 'Simple Offline Usenet Packet'. This is a format that has become very popular lately, mainly because the newer versions of UQWK for UNIX systems supports it. If you have access to a dial-up UNIX account and would like to read News and E-Mail at home, check out uqwk.

The SOUP format has a lot of advantages over the QWK format, especially when reading News and E-mail. Subjects and adresses are not limited to 25 characters and in UQWK the threading actually works (unlike in QWK mode) The SOUP format is highly recommended over the QWK format if possible.

AmiTCP users may use the SOUP format by telnetting to the internet provider and run uqwk there, and then transfer the resulting packet via ftp. Or use the section The TCP system type module, which is slower, but a bit more comfortable.

THOR creates reply-packets with the name <mail-packet name>.out

Note that there is a special UQWK_SOUP type. This exists because uqwk does not quite follow the SOUP standard, so you have to use this type instead of plain SOUP if you want resigning and joining of newsgroups to work from the GUI.

Along with the THOR distribution is a script that is meant to be used on the remote UNIX system for grabbing news and mail using uqwk with SOUP. This script is located in the unix/ directory. Upload this script to the remote UNIX machine and type the following to make it executable:

chmod +x grab

If you want to use some other mail packet name than 'soup', change the script accordingly. A plain 'grab' suffices normally, but some options are available. An alias for the options you want is a good idea.

The options available in the script are:

  -r : Do not use the "rz" program to transfer replies (<mail-packet name>.out)
       to the UNIX side. 
  -s ) Do not use the "sz" program to transfer the grab from the UNIX
       side.
  -n ) Do not grab news.  Nice if you just want to read mail and do not
       have time to grab news.
  -m ) Do not grab mail.  If you for some reason do not wish to read new
       mail, use this.  If you just want to enter replies, '-n -m' works
       fine. 
  -u ) Do not limit the size of news grabbed to 400kB.
  -x ) Restore mail, used if you somehow lost mail the last time you
       grabbed.
  -z ) Restore news, used if you somehow lost news the last time you
       grabbed.  '-x -z' works fine.

UQWK_SOUP is supported with a simple NComm script, that might or might not work on your Unix system (modifications might be needed to make it work correctly).


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