Version History

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 FC1 to ListSTAR 1.1 Release

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 b4 to ListSTAR 1.1 FC1

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 b3 to ListSTAR 1.1 b4

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 b2 to ListSTAR 1.1 b3

Changes from ListSTAR 1.0.1 b1 to ListSTAR 1.1 b2

Changes from ListSTAR 1.0 to ListSTAR 1.0.1 b1

Known Problems

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 FC1 to ListSTAR 1.1 Release:

• The installer will ALWAYS install everything in the templates, scripts, and applescripts folder overwriting anything of the same name that is there.

• Corrected some rules in the Templates which affected the email-on-demand functionality.

• The installer no longer creates a hidden file within the empty folders it creates.

• If you rename a service it performs a full audit. This makes it so multiple imports of the same service type can be done without quiting or restarting the daemon.

• If it is a "mailer" type service being renamed, if looks if its name is in any timer rules that have a "send from" action. If the old service name is found in these rules, it changes it to the new service name.

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 b4 to ListSTAR 1.1 FC1:

• Made a change to the ListSTAR/POP TCP/IP panel (under general preferences) to disable the nameresolver popup menu when running under OT.

• Fixed a problem where mail forwarded to a list was thought of as "tried" and waiting for a "retry host" interval before attempting to send. This should cause mail to be sent out faster when mail is forwarded to a list. This corrects a problem introduced in beta 4.

• Changed the Installer to NOT install MacTCP when it can tell that Open Transport is present (by the TCP/IP item being present in the Control Panels folder).

• Fixed a problem with "imports". It didn't mark the email address of imported services to "required" causing mail to not always "go" to the right service.

Enhancements:

• Added service templates, and specific import types to the Scripts Menu (this is done on install).

• Installer mods to change the name of the example services to "old xxx" so that the doc won't be totally out of date.....

• Added a "barber pole" dialog that is displayed when scripts are executed from the Scripts Menu.

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 b3 to ListSTAR 1.1 b4:

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a Problem where the Content-Transfer-Encoding line was not written correctly in the RFC header when forwarding mail with minimal headers.

• Some memory leaks that only affected ListSTAR/POP were fixed (-108 & -109 errors).

• Fix for ListSTAR/POP to not freeze/crash when closing general prefs window on 68k machines.

• Integrated in some OT fixes.

• Fix of ListSTAR/POP when no "From" address is present. This is now caught by the "list-server/mail-daemon" trigger.

• In ListSTAR/SMTP, "host down" messages are no longer sent since all of the information needed to send them is not present in the ListSTAR product.

• When a message is forwarded to an address list intermediate files are created which contain the number of recipients per message. These intermediate files are No Longer eligible for sending until we've totally processed the address list. If an error occurs, we can easily remove all of the intermediates and reprocess the mail without anyone receiving duplicates. This will cause a little more delay in the sending of the mail to the lists, but it will be much more reliable.

• Fix for a problem that limited the number of copies of mail-files we could create (and therefore the maximum number of addresses that could be forwarded to). The fix allows us to create many more temporary files so that the size of the address lists is now limited to 10,000 * the maximum number of recipients per message (much larger than the mac itself can handle.....).

Enhancements:

• ListSTAR/POP becomes OT native.

• Added two new Apple Events:
  
  • -Import Service
    
  • -Audit Service

• Added the "Scripts" menu:
  There must be a folder named "Scripts" in the "ADMIN" folder for this menu to be added. Any aliases, applications, compiled scripts, or text files located in this folder will then be added to the menu at startup time (the menu is NOT dynamically updated).

• Changes to allow the outgoing number of recipients allowed per message to be overridden on a per-address list basis (a hidden option).
  The Hidden Option is holding down the Option key and doing a Get Info on an Address List in the Address List window. You can then change the number of recipients per message on a forward. So instead of 100 you can set it to 500 for large announce lists. This will mean that mail will be delivered slower to all of the recipients but for announcements it really doesn't matter. It does mean that there are less sendmail threads open on the default Unix machine and the number of files in the Message Spool Folder on ListSTAR are reduced considerably. For ex. for a 30000 member list if it is set to 100 recipients there will be 600 files (2 files per message, 300 messages with 100 recipients each). If it is set to 500 then it will 120 files (2 files per message, 60 messages with 500 recipients each).

• Removed "server name" from the popups that test from/to/cc addresses. It was only useful in the QM/MS/QD versions of the product which we are no longer shipping or supporting.

• 'aete' resource was changed to remove references to QuickMail and MS Mail. Also, fields relating strictly to these mailers were removed from the 'aete' Also, a lot of the parameter names were changed to lower case.

• Change for ListSTAR/POP to only do one POP login per session. When it is determined that a service is to execute (send pending mail was executed, there is mail pending to be sent for this service, or the timer indicates that its time to run) we now do the following:
  
  • If there is an AppleScript to execute on login, execute it.
    
  • If there is mail pending to send, send it via SMTP. A POP login is NO LONGER DONE to validate the account information before the SMTP send is done.
    
  • Login to the POP server and download any pending mail for this service.
  • If there is an AppleScript to execute on logout, execute it. The mail that was downloaded is then processed, which might result in outgoing mail which will probably loop us back to the top (unless we were executed by a "connect now", in which case we won't re-execute immediately).

• Change to ListSTAR/SMTP so that, when comparing the recipient address of and incoming piece of mail to the email addresses of the accounts, it will do a compare of the FULL email address (including hostname). If no match is found, then it will do a partial compare (ignoring the hostname portion of both addresses).
  This will allow L*/SMTP to have multiple accounts of the same name but with different hostnames listed (sales@abc.com and sales@xyz.com). Only problem with this approach is that if all of the "full name" compares fail, the account associated with the first "partial name" match will be the one that will receive the mail (and you can't control which one this is).
  NOTE: the full name match means just that. It will NOT match partial domain names (sales@abc.com does NOT match sales@def.abc.com).

• Change to ListSTAR/POP to make the login/logout AppleScripts relate only to the service that they are specified from. Previous versions had these as global items....

Changes from ListSTAR 1.1 b2 to ListSTAR 1.1 b3:

• Fixed a Problem where ListSTAR would send an AppleEvent to an application (Frontier or AppleScript App) and the application would turn around and send a high level AppleEvent back to ListSTAR (e.g. StarNine Subscribe). The AppleEvent would not be handled and would eventually timeout.

Enhancements:

• ListSTAR/SMTP (only) is now "Open Transport" native (not PPC native). It will make direct OT calls if running under OT (needs release 1.1 or later of OT).

• New "Forward with minimal headers" option.
  The "Forward to" option has been turned into a popup. The original item is now labeled as "with full headers", and the new capability is labeled as "with minimum headers". Selecting this new capability will remove ALL headers from the forwarded mail message except for the following (if they are present):
  Date:
  Message-Id:
  From:
  Subject:
  To:
  CC:
  Mime-Version:
  Content-Type:
  Content-Encoding:

• New "Set From to account address, no Sender:" option on Forwarding mail. This option allows you to forward mail anonymously because the Sender is not added into the RFC header. "Set From to account address, with Sender:" is still an option.

• New "pre-defined" variable names.
  They only work in the text-edit fields, and if there is no account attribute that corresponds to them, the variable will be replaced with a space.
  {ACCT_FULL_NAME}
  {ACCT_EMAIL_ADDR}
  {ACCT_FIRST_NAME}
  {ACCT_LAST_NAME}
  {ACCT_MAIL_SYSTEM}
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER}
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER_ZONE}

  Below are the Mappings for the variables with each "flavor" of ListSTAR.

  ListSTAR SMTP
  {ACCT_FULL_NAME} - Maps to service's "Friendly Name"
  {ACCT_EMAIL_ADDR} - Maps to service's "Email Address"
  {ACCT_FIRST_NAME} - <space>
  {ACCT_LAST_NAME} - <space>
  {ACCT_MAIL_SYSTEM} - <space>
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER} - <space>
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER_ZONE} - <space>

  ListSTAR/POP
  {ACCT_FULL_NAME} - Maps to service's "Real Name"
  {ACCT_EMAIL_ADDR} - Maps to service's "Login ID" and "Incoming Host" fields
  {ACCT_FIRST_NAME} - <space>
  {ACCT_LAST_NAME} - <space>
  {ACCT_MAIL_SYSTEM} - POP/PMM
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER} - <space>
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER_ZONE} - <space>

  ListSTAR/QM
  {ACCT_FULL_NAME} - <space>
  {ACCT_EMAIL_ADDR} - <space>
  {ACCT_FIRST_NAME} - Service's "First Name"
  {ACCT_LAST_NAME} - Service's "Last Name"
  {ACCT_MAIL_SYSTEM} - QuickMail/PMM
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER} - Service's "Mailcenter"
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER_ZONE} - Service's Mailcenter "Zone"

  ListSTAR/MS
  {ACCT_FULL_NAME} - Maps to "Account Name"
  {ACCT_EMAIL_ADDR} - <space>
  {ACCT_FIRST_NAME} - Maps to "Account Name"
  {ACCT_LAST_NAME} - <space>
  {ACCT_MAIL_SYSTEM} - Microsoft/PMM
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER} - Maps to "Server" Name
  {ACCT_MAIL_CENTER_ZONE} - Maps to Zone of Server
  

Changes from ListSTAR 1.0.1 b1 to ListSTAR 1.1 b2:

• Triggers:
  • Message Priority trigger extended to handle "Bulk|List|Junk" (added "Junk").

• AppleEvent Send fix for Regular Expressions sent via 9Lis9Evt event. It was previously not sending it as a "list" but rather as a "string"

• Under threads (ListSTAR/SMTP), a problem could occur on address list expansion that would cause multiple copies of the mail to be sent to some of the users in the list. This would happen IF an error occurred while expanding the address list AND the error occurred after more than 100 address list entries had been processed.

• Since we create multiple mail-files for each block of 100 recipients, a background thread (the sender) could send a mail-file that had been stamped with 100 recipients BEFORE an error condition occurred. We now don't let these intermediate files be seen by the send thread until all intermediate files are ready to go (all the addresses in the address lists have been processed).

• Corrected a problem when a Subject was greater than 255 characters it could cause ListSTAR to crash.

• Corrected a problem where an Address-list name that was greater than 31 characters could not be referred to from AppleScript/Frontier.

• Corrected a problem in the StarNine Log Event where a message written to Protocol would generate an error. The Log Level Classification of Protocol was changed to Plus Protocol to allow a script to write a message in the log at Protocol level logging.

• Fixed a problem where a Timer rule would not send an AE to an AppleScript Application or to a Frontier script.

Enhancements:

• Some small performance improvements when writing an address list after mods in the UI (buffering of write data).

• Pre-defined variables: The following predefined variables may be used in any text-edit box in the rules UI (They do not work if they are in a text file and you "edit" the text file within ListSTAR). When a rule is triggered, and the value in the text-edit box includes one of these pre-defined variables, that variable will be replaced with the indicated value.

  Pre-defined variables (the variables MUST be surrounded with {} to be properly recognized):
  {DATE_S}the short date:12/01/95
  {DATE_L}the long date:Friday, December 1, 1995
  {DATE_A}the abbreviated date:Fri, Dec 1, 1995
  {TIME}the time:1:16 PM
  {TIME_S}the time with seconds:1:16:17 PM
  

  The format of the date/time items can be controlled by the settings within the "Date/Time" control panel.
  One of the areas that these pre-defined variables are useful is in setting the subject of a digest that is being mailed from a timer-service to include the short date.

• FSSpec to Alias changes
  All files referenced by rules have had their internal representation changed for FSSpecs to Aliases. This means you can easily move services (or the entire ListSTAR folder) between machines/disks and not have to worry about reconnecting files from rules.
  It also means that you can rename address lists in the "Address Lists" folder to be more meaningful names (the rename must be done from the Finder AND it must be done while listSTAR is NOT running. References to these files will be corrected when ListSTAR starts up).
  You can then move files around (text files or files reference by rules), rename folders (folders which ListSTAR files mail into) or rename files (text files or files reference by rules) and the rules will still find them.
  You MUST still leave all address lists in the Address Lists Folder. You cannot Rename a Service folder unless you do the renaming by renaming the service in the ListSTAR Services Window.

Changes from ListSTAR 1.0 to ListSTAR 1.0.1 b1:

• Ability to "select" multiple files.
  This is normally done to "send" multiple files in a mail message, but the other actions also apply to all files selected (File and Clear). The actions are applied to the files that are selected in the order they are selected (and appear in the selection window). This capability was added, in conjunction with the new digest action, to allow simple digests to be sent to lists with a table-of-contents.

• "send to" action will always generate a "To:" address that is the same as the
  "From:" address. All members of the selected lists(s) will be BCC recipients of the mail.

• RFC headers can now be added to messages generated by timer rules.

• Triggers:
  
  • The "subject" trigger has been changed to a popup. You can now select a trigger that will search the RFC header for the specified pattern. The "subject" selection can be thought of as a special case of the RFC header search that prepends the pattern "^Subject: " (minus the quotes) to the specified string.

  • The "Body" search can now be limited to the first line or the first 5 lines. The default behavior is to search the entire body.

  • The "Message Priority" trigger has become a popup that allows you to select "Urgent" or "bulk/list". The "bulk/list" is pretty much a shorthand entry for the RFC header item that looks for the pattern "Precedence: bulk|Precedence: list", although it treats "Precedence:", "Priority:", and "X-Priority" as the same thing.

• Actions:
  
  • In the "Mailing-list", "Digest Actions" area, there are a set of new checkboxes/selection button that allow you to specify a "table of contents" file AND specify what should be added to it. If you select "Add subject", the following will be added:

    -> [subject of message]

    where [subject of message] is the subject of the current message. If you select "Add sender", the following will be added:

    by [sender of message]

    where [sender of message] is the person who authored the message. This sender address is obtained from the RFC header of the target message and includes any name fields that might be present in the address line. It is suggested that this action be used along with the "Select a digest file" set of actions to build TWO SEPARATE files that will then be selected and sent via a timer rule.

  • AppleScript Selection:
    Anytime an AppleScript can be selected, you can now also select an alias. The name of the item selected is now passed to the script/application that is executed. This allows you to have one script/application that handles multiple triggers/actions but differentiates them by the name of the selected entry (the alias).

  • New Variables passed to AppleScripts
    Added a new "Current Script Name" argument ('s9ScriptName') which is the name of the item that has been selected from the UI (AS text, compiled AS, applet, application, or alias).

  • New AppleEvent support
    Added some AppleEvents -- events to query what address-lists, services and protocols are installed, as well as support for 'do script' -- and two classes, one to describe services and another to describe address-lists. Point your script-editor dictionary at liststar for details.

  • Frontier Scripts
    Frontier scripts can now be selected and run via ListSTAR.
    

• The "windowshade" of the services window has been fixed. You will no longer have to resort to resedit hacks to get the services window back up and visible.

• A problem with address-lists that could cause an infinite loop in certain situation where the address list was in an improper format and an add/delete was performed.

• An 'Activate' sent to ListSTAR out of AppleScript did not work. The AppleScript would time-out.

• Fixed a bug where selecting an applescript application or script to run out of a timer would return a -30017. Now they will run (though the args at the head of TEXT scripts and arguments sent to an application will be empty).

• Fixed a bug where an address-list name that was less than six characters long, could not be referred to from AppleScript.

• The "mailer-daemon" trigger now properly deals with a zero-length SMTP FROM envelope address. This address is legally used when some SMTP routers are returning mail and they want to avoid mail loops. The trigger treats this as one of the special "mailer-daemon" addresses, even though other pieces of ListSTAR may not recognize this properly (like the "check mail" window).

• Fixed a problem in ListSTAR/MS that could truncate large messages that were being forwarded at 8K.

• Fixed a problem in ListSTAR/SMTP that threads could "fall asleep" if the threads window was not left open.

Known Problems:

• If two or more high level AppleEvents (ie. StarNine Subscribe) hit ListSTAR at the same time ListSTAR will crash.

• A Service's name cannot have a "/" in the name. The Service cannot be chosen in popup menus (ie. in the Timer Service when you select a service to send the Digest).

• If someone has an illegal address (ie. a space in the address) and it is in the From or Reply-To line of the RFC header, and ListSTAR is set to "add the from address" to a list the illegal address will be added.

• Problem with the UI when a rule references a folder (ie. file mail in folder) the UI will not take you to the path of the selected folder when the "Select Folder" button is clicked.

• A re-sized Service's window will show half cells.

• The re-size box (lower right corner) of the Service's window remains active

• If you do a StarNine Send in applescript and you have the script send TO a valid address and BCC or CC an address list that is empty, no message will be sent.

• The Copy and Paste commands in the Edit menu are not visibly active when coping a rule between services. You can still use the keyboard combination command-C to copy a rule selected in a service switch to another service and use command-V to paste the copied rule.

• If you deactivate a Timer Service you must recheck the service and open it and click OK in order for the Service to be activated again.

• If you drag the Service's window from a monitor which displays thousands of colors to one which displays few the Service's window will not show up correctly.