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1997-10-23
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Post Road Mailer Address Book Utilities
---------------------------------------
The Post Road Mailer address books are kept in binary files that cannot be
edited or easily changed except from within the program. We have received
inquiries from users for a way to create or change address books using external
programs or editors, or change them in ways the Post Road Mailer wasn't designed
to do. These REXX utility programs are provided to facilitate such changes.
Each Post Road Mailer address book is kept in a file in the main Post Road
Mailer directory and has an extension of .ADR. These utilities do not modify an
*.ADR file directly. Instead, you use ADR2ASC.CMD to export an *.ADR file's
contents to ASCII files which you can modify or add more entries to, and then
use ASC2ADR.CMD to convert the ASCII files back to an *.ADR file.
Format of the ASCII Files
=========================
READ THESE FIRST FIVE TIPS WHETHER YOU CARE ABOUT THE FILE FORMAT OR NOT:
1. When you need to edit an *.ASC or *.GRP file, you must always use an editor,
such as E.EXE, that does not convert Tab characters to spaces the way most
editors do!
2. The part of the first line of the *.ASC file after the address book's title
must not be changed, or the program will not recognize the file as a valid *.ASC
file.
3. The fourth line of both the *.ASC file and the *.GRP file must be blank.
4. The address book entries begin on line five of the *.ASC file. The address
group entries begin on line five of the *.GRP file.
5. The format has totally changed from that used in previous versions of
ADR2ASC.CMD and ASC2ADR.CMD, so if you have any sort of custom utilities which
depend on that old format, you must not replace your old ADR2ASC.CMD and
ASC2ADR.CMD files with these new ones.
The ASCII files created by ADR2ASC and FLDR2ASC and NOTE2ASC, and the ASCII
files input to ASC2ADR have the same structure. (The following description of
the file format may be easier to understand if you run ADR2ASC against an
existing Post Road Mailer address book and examine the resulting files.)
The first line of the *.ASC and *.GRP files must contain the title of the
address book, followed by the string " (Post Road Mailer address book" (or
"....address groups") and at least one more character after that. The contents
of the second and third lines are not important, except as information for the
user. The fourth line must be blank. The rest of the lines in each file are
the address entries, one entry per line.
In the *.GRP file, which is just the address group entries, the format of each
line is quite simple: The name of the group, a Tab character, the first address
in the group, a Tab character, the second address, a Tab character, the third
address, etc. If you have more addresses than can fit on a line in your editor,
break the line after a Tab character and continue on the next line. On lines
which are not be to interpreted as continuing, do not finish with a Tab
character. A line that ends with a Tab character will have the following line
appended as if there had been no line break at all. A line that does not end
with a Tab character will be interpreted as the end of the entry.
In the *.ASC file, which is just the non-group entries, the format of each line
is shown on the third line of the file. The field data must be entered in that
exact order, with each field separated from the next by a Tab character. Fields
which contain no data are represented by having nothing at all between one Tab
character and the next. Each entry (line) must contain exactly 16 Tab
characters, unless there are multiple lines of Notes, in which case there is
another Tab between each Note field and the next, at the end of the line.
Further, each entry must contain either a non-blank Last Name field or a
non-blank Organization field.
If you need to change the order in which ASC2ADR.CMD expects the fields and the
order in which the other programs create them, the program lines you need to
modify are:
ADR2ASC 91 & 244
ASC2ADR 61
FLDR2ASC 95
NOTE2ASC 96
ADR2ASC
=======
ADR2ASC will convert an existing Post Road Mailer address book into a pair of
ASCII files. The only command line parameter of the ADR2ASC program is the name
of the address book file to be converted. For example,
ADR2ASC C:\POSTROAD\FRIENDS
Address book files must have an .ADR extension, though you need not type the
.ADR part of the filename as part of the command.
If a file by the same name as the *.ADR file, but with an *.ASC or *.GRP
extension exists in the current directory, ADR2ASC.CMD will ask you whether you
want to overwrite the existing output files, append all the *.ADR file's entries
to the *.ASC and *.GRP files, append only the non-unique entries, or exit the
program without doing any of those things. A non-group entry is considered
"unique" if none of the email addresses in the entry is exactly identical (case
insensitive) to any of the entries which were in the original *.ASC file. A
group entry is considered "unique" if the group name is not exactly identical
(case insensitive) to any of the entries which were in the original *.GRP file.
ASC2ADR
=======
This program takes the name of an *.ASC file (or *.TXT file or whatever, but the
format of the file must be that of the *.ASC file described above, regardless of
the filename you've given it) as a command line parameter. (You must specify
the filename's extension if it is not .ASC.) It takes the *.ASC file and the
*.GRP file by the same name, if it exists, in the current directory, and turns
them into an *.ADR file by the same name, in the current directory. The Post
Road Mailer won't see the *.ADR file until you place it into that program's main
directory.
FLDR2ASC
========
This program creates an *.ASC file containing an entry for each note in the
specified folder. The entry will be the name (if known) and address on the
Reply-to: line, From: line (if no Reply-to: line exists), or Sender: line (if no
Reply-to: or From: line exists) of each note. Duplicate entries (those with an
address which matches [case insensitive] the address of another entry in that
folder) will not be added.
Parameter: Pathname of the directory which is the folder from which you want
the *.ASC file entries made. For example, the College subfolder of your Friends
folder, in your address@wherever.com inbasket, is probably
C:\POSTROAD\ADDRESS\FRIENDS\COLLEGE.
You will probably want to modify the title of the address book named in the
*.ASC file, and rename the *.ASC file as well, before you create an *.ADR file
from it. Or, if you want to add this folder's addresses to an existing address
book instead of creating a new one, you can do the following:
- Use ADR2ASC.CMD to create *.ASC and *.GRP files from the *.ADR file
- Use FLDR2ASC.CMD to create an *.ASC file from the folder's notes
- Move the entries from the latter *.ASC file to the former *.ASC file
- Delete the latter *.ASC file
- Use ASC2ADR.CMD to create the *.ADR file from the former *.ASC file
NOTE2ASC
========
This program creates an *.ASC file, in the current directory, containing entries
for any number of the internet addresses found in a particular *.POP file. The
*.POP file is specified as a command line parameter. This means that you can
run the program from the command line, or you can drag a note from your Post
Road Mailer inbasket or from a folder, and drop it on a program object which
executes NOTE2ASC (since a dragged file's full path/filename specification is
always passed as a command line parameter to a program object on which it is
dropped unless the creator of the program object has taken steps to avoid that).
When specifying the *.POP filename at the command line, you do not have to type
the .POP extension. The program will add ".POP" to the end of any filename
which doesn't already end with that string.
For each internet address found in the note file, the program will display the
address as well as the entire line of text in which it was found, and ask you
for the name which should be associated with that address. If you don't want an
entry created for a particular address, just hit the Enter key instead of typing
a name.
You will probably want to modify the title of the address book named in the
*.ASC file, and rename the *.ASC file as well, before you create an *.ADR file
from it. Or, if you want to add the note's addresses to an existing address
book instead of creating a new one, you can do the following:
- Use ADR2ASC.CMD to create *.ASC and *.GRP files from the *.ADR file
- Use NOTE2ASC.CMD to create an *.ASC file from the note's addresses
- Move the entries from the latter *.ASC file to the former *.ASC file
- Delete the latter *.ASC file
- Use ASC2ADR.CMD to create the *.ADR file from the former *.ASC file