rnMac is shareware, so if you use it, please send $25 to me at the address listed above (please make out cheques to me, Roy Wood, and be sure to include your email address so I can send you the registration code!). The cost of registration is pretty cheap, and every registration I receive provides a disproportionately large incentive for me to keep banging away at improving the program, so.....
General Stuff:
rnMac is a offline newsreader/mailer for Macintosh computers. If you don't know what Usenet news is, you probably don't have much need for this program. Contrary to what the name implies, this is not a port of “rn” or any similarly-named newsreader.
rnMac now knows how to interact with NNTP servers in addition to its ability to work with a uucp-based feed (such as one involving UUPC and ToadNews). To use rnMac in an NNTP context, you will, of course, have to have MacTCP installed and configured correctly on your Mac. If you're already confused, I suggest you pick up a copy of Adam Engst's excellent book, “Internet Starter Kit For Macintosh.” (where's that URL when I need it?)
To use rnMac, you'll need to install Apple's Thread Manager extension if it's not a standard part of your system software (it's standard for 7.5 and later). The thread manager is available for anonymous FTP as:
When you first run rnMac, you will have to create a settings file. This file holds the list of subscribed newsgroups, the name of your news-server, your email address, etc. Use the “New Settings File” option under the “File” menu to create the settings file, and store it wherever you like. As you might expect, once the settings file has been created, you can just double-click it to launch rnMac with the appropriate preferences in effect.
Eventually rnMac will support InternetConfig. This will happen faster if a lot of people specifically request it, since right now, my impression is that not too many people use it (I'm probably wrong again, but you'll let me know, won't you?).
The various preferences can be set using the “Preferences” option in the Edit menu. The different groups of settings and their meanings are pretty obvious, but just to be safe, here's a more explicit description of each, as well as some general comments:
NNTP Preferences:
Server Name — the name of your NNTP news server
User Name — the user-name you use to log-in to the newserver
Password — the password you use to log-in to the newserver
Send User/Password — indicates whether the user/password should be sent
Use Lower-Case NNTP Commands — indicates whether lower-case NNTP commands should be sent
Maximum Articles — the maximum number of articles to get from the server
Note that many NNTP servers do not require that the user/password strings be sent. Only your news administrator can tell you for sure if this is required, and, if so, what your user-id and password are. My news server does not require user-id's and passwords, so I haven't actually tested this out, and I'm curious to know if it works.
The maximumum number of articles to retrieve from the server can be set as high or low as you like. When you get news from the server for the very first time ever, there will obviously be a lot of unread articles available, so you might want to set this preference to a low number at first. Then again, you might like sitting around for several minutes as several thousand headers and articles are retrieved.
Article Reader Preferences:
Show “Re:” Headers — indicates whether the “Re:” is shown in subject lists
Delete Read Articles — indicates whether read articles are deleted upon quit
Mark Cross-Postings — indicates whether cross-posted articles should be marked read
Sorting — dictates the criterion used to sort article lists
Header Display — controls whether full, none, or selected article headers are displayed
I plan to eventually have followup article headers left blank (like trn does) if the “Show “Re:” Headers” feature is enabled, but right now, it doesn't do much.
If the “Mark Cross Postings As Read” feature is enabled, then articles which have been posted to multiple newsgroups are marked as read when the current newsgroup is closed. This is applied to all articles in the group, even unread ones, thus ensuring you see articles only once.
Files/Folders Preferences:
News Folder — the folder in which downloaded articles are stored
Spool Folder — the folder in which outgoing articles are temporarily stored
Saved Articles Folder — the folder in which articles should be saved
Signature File — the text-file containing the user's signature lines
Active Groups File — the text-file listing all available groups
Eudora Nicknames File - the pathname to the Eudora nicknames file
Saved Articles Creator/Type — the creator and file type for saved files
Each of these options is most easily set by using the “Select Folder” or “Select File” button beside it.
Downloaded articles are stored in a folder-based hierarchy in the “News” folder. For example, all articles in rec.humor.funny are stored in a folder called “funny”, which is in turn located in a folder called “humor”, which is located in a folder called “rec” inside the “News” folder. Because of the way the MacOS maintains file directories on disks, accessing files in folders containing a lot of files (1000+) is very slow, so try to delete read articles, rather than keeping them around to suck up disk space. If you absolutely must keep around a lot of old articles, be sure to increase the disk cache as specified in the “Memory” Control Panel under the Apple Menu.
The “Saved Articles Folder” setting allows you to specify the default folder in which articles will be saved when you choose the “Save Article” option under the file menu. If this setting is left blank, then the standard Save-File dialog box will open up to the folder containing rnMac, and you can choose the final location for the saved article in the usual manner.
The "Eudora Nicknames File" usually points to the file that Eudora uses to save its nicknames list, though you could just as easily point it to another file of your own design (make sure it's a text-file with single line entries like this: "alias RoyWood rrwood@io.org". Eudora seems to usually store its nickname file in the Eudora folder in the System Folder, though I suspect it's possible to customize this. If this field is left blank, then the nicknames file is not used, and the associated menus are left empty.
Saved files (articles in particular) are created with the creator signature and file type specified by the “Saved Articles Creator Signature” and “Saved Articles File Type” settings respectively. For example, if these settings are “ttxt” and “TEXT”, then saved articles will be marked as text files created by TeachText. When the “Select Type/Creator” button is used to set thes preferences, the creator signature and file type are both taken from the selected file.
Posting Preferences:
Name — the name of the user (you!)
Organization — the name of the user's organization
Email Address — the user's email address
Time Difference — the user's time difference from Greenwich Mean Time
Distribution — the distribution range of articles
Maximum Line Width — the maximum line-width for outgoing articles
Quote Char — the characters inserted at the start of quoted lines of text
The first first five options are the default values inserted in the headers of outgoing articles.
The maximum line width restriction is applied when the article is actually sent to the NNTP server, not as the article is edited (the WASTE text-editing engine doesn't support that yet, though I might take a stab at adding that functionality).
Disk Scanning Preferences:
Scan newsfolder at startup — controls whether the newsfolder is scanned at startup
Verbose logging of newsfolder — controls whether verbose logging of info is performed
Delete old articles before quitting — controls whether old articles are deleted when quitting the program (number of days to keep articles can also be specified here)
For people who get their news via uucp or some other method, it is desirable to have rnMac automatically scan the newsfolder for new articles at startup. This is possible via the first option in this dialog.
The second option allows the user to control the amount of logging info dumped into the “Status Log” window (useful to me while I'm debugging).
Articles (either fully-downloaded or just references to available articles) are deleted when the settings file is closed, which for most people is when they are quitting the program. Only articles which are marked as “read” are deleted. To force deleting of articles as soon as possible, enter a value of zero for the number of days to keep them. The delay before expiring/deleting old news can be customized for each group as well— just option-click on the group's name in the list of subscribed groups.
Subscribing To Newsgroups:
To subscribe to groups, choose "Show Active Newsgroups" under the Groups menu, double-click on the group you're interested in, or highlight a group name and then choose "Subscribe" from the Groups menu. When you subscribe to a group, it is not automatically opened; rather, the group name is simply added to the subscribed groups list.
If you wish to remove a group from your subscribed groups list, click once on it in the "Subscribed Groups" window to highlight it, and then choose "Unsubscribe" from the Newsgroups menu. You can also shift-click to select multiple groups to unsubscribe.
Obviously, the very first time you run the program, the list of active newsgroups will be empty, so you will have to download it from your news server. To do this, use the “Download Full Newsgroup List” option under the NNTP menu. Be forewarned that this could take a while, since many servers carry about 16000+ newsgroups these days.
If you wish, you can also manually add groups to the list of active newsgroups using the “Add Newsgroup To Active List” option under the Groups menu.
You should probably make an occasional check for new newsgroups using the “Download New Newsgroups” option under the NNTP menu. New groups are listed in a separate window in addition to being added to the list of active groups, thus making it easy to identify which groups are new.
Downloading News:
Once your NNTP settings are configured and you've subscribed to the groups that interest you, you're all set to download the news from the NNTP server. rnMac gives you several choices as to how you'd like to do this: you can download the complete text of all new articles, you can download just the headers for new articles, or you can download the bodies of unread articles.
The first option is pretty simple, but the other two may seem a little odd until you realize that they make it possible to download just the headers for new articles, screen out unwanted ones, then download just the articles which interest you (thereby saving connection time and charges). Best of all, you can go through and mark out all the unwanted articles in a group while other groups are still being processed.
The headers of articles which are not fully downloaded are displayed in italic text in article list windows, so it's easy to tell if the full article is on-disk or not.
The technique of selectively downloading articles works very well for groups with a low signal to noise ratio, but for other groups, you may wish to automatically download the full articles all the time. To do this, just highlight the group in the “Subscribed Groups” window and toggle on the “Always Get Full Articles” flag using the “Edit Group Settings” submenu under the Groups menu or by simply option-clicking on the group name in the list of subscribed groups. The status of this and other group-specific settings is displayed at the bottom of the “Subscribed Groups” window when the cursor is over a group name.
Reading News:
Reading news is pretty straightforward: just double-click on the name of a newsgroup to open it up, or press the spacebar or return/enter key to open the highlighted group. Once a newsgroup is open, double-click on a header, or press return/enter to open a highlighted article.
If you find an article that you'd like to save for future reference, you can, of course, just save it as a textfile, or you can save a copy of it in a special “archival” newsgroup. To do this, first create the group using the “Create Archival Newsgroup” option under the Groups menu, then use the “Transfer” menu to transfer a copy of the desired article to the archival group.
Some other useful hints for reading articles are:
To force the displaying of headers for an article, hold down the option key as you open the article.
Press the space bar to open the next unread article and to page through an article.
Use the right/left arrow keys to mark articles as read/unread in the article list window.
Use the delete/backspace keys to delete articles from the list of available articles.
Command-click on URL's to open them (this relies on InternetConfig being available).
Posting News:
Posting of new articles works about how you'd expect: use the “Post To Current Group”, or the “Post To Group:”, or the “Post Followup Article” options under the Articles menu to create the new posting, edit the text of the posting, then save it. New articles are spooled until you explicitly choose to send them (assumedly the next time you connect to your news server). Spooled articles can be edited later, since they are accessable via the “Spooled Postings” window which is listed under the Window menu.
It is possible to email copies of outgoing articles, if you wish. Just toggle on the “Send As Email” checkbox in the upper right corner of the outgoing posting window.
Eudora Support:
If you examine the "Articles" menu, you'll see there are options there that allow you to use Eudora to email replies and forward articles. Interaction with Eudora is accomplished via Apple Events (programming Apple Event code in C is really horrible, just in case you're interested), so it should work pretty well under normal circumstances. Naturally, rnMac tries to launch Eudora if it's not already running, which requires searching of the Finder's Desktop files for all mounted volumes. If you're having trouble getting rnMac to launch Eudora, try rebuilding your desktop by holding down the option key as you start up your Mac.
The “Forward Article” feature normally does not insert the quote-string at the start of each line of text in the forwarded article. To force rnMac to insert the quote-string, hold down the option key as you make the menu selection.
I like Eudora a lot, and I don't use any other mailer (unless you count the occasional fling with elm when SLIP isn't working), so I have no plans to build in support for other mailers.
Complaints Department:
I'm still working on improving rnMac, so drop me a note with your suggestions for improvement. Currently, I can be reached as “rrwood@io.org”.
Version History:
July 1996 v2.0d4
- faster saving of thread data for each group implemented
- fixed bug that failed to mark thread data as dirty after altering article status (manifested as italicized article entries for articles which *were* downloaded already)
- consolidated "preferences" dialogs
- cleaned up all components' responses to changes in preferences/settings
- added support for deleting old articles after a user-specified number of days
- added group settings display at bottom of subscribed groups list window, removed clunky old display of this info
- added option-click ability to edit group settings (always download full articles, never delete, archive group, expiry delay, etc.)
- added popup menu to “Edit Group Settings” dialog
- added save/discard/cancel dialog in response to attempted close of changed outgoing mail/news
- added internal SMTP mail handler
- implemented forwarding of articles via internal SMTP handler
- enhanced the outgoing news/mail editing window
June 1996, v2.0d3
- tweaked window update code to improve speed of redraws (still needs work)
- added capability to append/overwrite/save-as/cancel when saving article while reading article (as opposed to when just examining list of available articles)
- added code to deal gracefully with errors while deleting messages (increment past and continue deleting)
- tweaked support for HEAD command so errors caused by nonexistant (i.e. deleted) articles are tolerated better
- tweaked DNS resolver so that if an all-numeric IP address is entered (e.g. 123.456.78.9) is entered, that IP address is used directly, without doing further DNS lookups (Ehrensperger Marcel's network somehow requires this— maybe others do too)
- restructured format for article overview database (it's now fully readable as a text file and is much more space-efficient)
- archive groups are no longer opened in response to a “Open Next Unread Group” command (includes space bar)
- many hours spent debugging glitches introduced by new article overview database format
- optimized code for saving message-ID data (much faster!)
- modified thread database reset code so that files are just truncated to zero-length, rather than fully deleted (this preserves the NNTP numbers saved in each file)
- added support for Newsgroups: and References: headers longer than 256 characters
- improved processing of XOVER and HEAD data (less copying of data, acceptance of long References: data)
- added support for resetting a single group's thread data and rebuilding a single group's thread data
- cleaned up database.c scanning code
- made scanning/deleting dialogs non-modal, so application can be backgrounded during long, boring jobs
- fixed minor bug that caused read articles to marked as unread again after they were downloaded in full (affected only cross-posted articles)
- forced confusing tab characters to spaces in extracted subject, author, etc. data
- added support for automatic scanning of newsfolder at startup
- added support for “verbose logging” of newsfolder scanning data
- fixed memory leak in unread article counting code in newsrc.c
previous versions:
- look at the 'TEXT' resource called “Version History” in the rnMac resource fork
