CD Shareware Magazine 1996 December

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WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL 3.2: Bug Fix: Changes made in version 3.1 caused pulled News-In to write over the newsgroupslist (e.g., GROUPS.LST). Corrected. Enhancement: Added "root", "uucp", and "usenet" to the set of mailbox names ("postmaster", "mailer-daemon", and "sysop") that Mail-In automatically verifies. Enhancement: PCB-VRFY.EXE now uses the name separator specified in the UUCP portion of PCBSetUp and stored in PCBOARD.DAT (defaults to "."). Enhancement: PCB-VRFY.EXE now uses the PCBoard's ALIAS.IN file (if any) to translate mailbox aliases to user names. This file is located in the UUCP base path, specified in the UUCP portion of PCBSetUp. Bug Fix: KSP-VRFY.EXE and PCB-VRFY.EXE would hang if a file I/O error occurred during execution; corrected. 3.1: Major Bug Fix!: If a timeout occured while receiving the text of an inbound email message, KSP-Mail would send the error message "421 Internal problem, mail discarded" to the remote client and go back to look for the next SMTP command from the client; however, the client would still be sending the remainder of the message text and this confused the command interpreter, causing the program to ultimately crash. Now, after KSP-Mail sends the 421 error message to the client, it logs an explanation of the nature of the internal error, and then aborts the connection. The default value of "ksp-mail.server_timeout" has now been increased from 60 seconds to 300 seconds (5 minutes) per RFC 1123. Bug Fix: The NNTP server implemented by the "pushed" version of News-In was using the value of "sockdelay" rather than "ksp-mail.server_timeout". Corrected. Bug Fix: The wrong time stamp was being recorded in POSTED.IDX, thus affecting removal of old news article ID's. Corrected. Clean Up: Mail-In log files have been renamed for consistency (e.g., MAIL-IN.001 is now MAIL-IN1.LOG). Clean Up: Renamed PCBNEWSG.EXE to PCB-GRPS.EXE. WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL New Feature: Added a log file for the execution of external commands (EXT-CMDS.LOG). New Feature: Added six new configuration parameters to limit growth of log files (e.g., "ksp-mail.log_days_newsin=<days>"). (See KSP-MAIL.DOC) New Feature: Added support in Mail-In for the EXPN (Expand Mailing List) command of SMTP. (See description of "ksp-mail.mailing_list") New Feature: Added support for an external program that implements the ESMTP command "VRFY" to check whether or not a username is local to the BBS. Program is specified using the new parameter, "ksp-mail.vrfy_program". New Feature: Added ksp-mail.sitename_alias to support situations where the hostname used in the destination address of mail sent to your local site differs from the actual hostname of the machine. New Feature: Added support to limit the size of inbound news articles. The default is no limit, but can be set using the parameter "ksp-mail.max_article_bytes". New Feature: Created KSP-PACK.EXE to pack the POSTED.IDX file; loaded and executed by KSP-Mail at midnight. Enhancement: Mail-In now builds recipient list in a temporary file (RCPT-TO#.$, where "#" is the session number 1-4) rather than in memory, eliminating any concern of running out of available heap space. Enhancement: Replaced configuration parameter "sockdelay" by "ksp-mail.client_timeout" with default value of 300 seconds (5 minutes) per RFC 1123. Used by all client processes; twice this value is used by Mail-Out while waiting for acknowledge reply after transmitting the text of an email message. Enhancement: Added "Return-Path:" line to top of RFC header on inbound email messages. Change: If a client logs into the Mail-In or (pushed) News-In as the remote systems manager, the server will switch to management mode and only management commands will be recognized. Because of this, these commands no longer begin with a period; e.g., ".HELP" is now simply "HELP". WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL 3.0: New Feature: Remote Systems Management is now also accessible through the NNTP server when news is "pushed". Clean-Up: Added "Max-Article-Days" and "Max-Message-Bytes" to the set of parameters that can be modified via remote system management. Enhancement: Changed default value of "ksp-mail.max_article_days" from 14 to 7. 2.9: New Feature: Added support in Mail-In for the SMTP command "VRFY". This optional command was not required by the original SMTP spec (RFC 821), but has since been designated mandatory by STD 3, RFC 1123. Since KSP-Mail does not have access to the usernames valid on the BBS, it must always give a positive response to the VRFY command, whether the user exists or not; responsibility for rejection of the inbound message due to an invalid username is left to the UUCP import utility. Enhancement: The inbound email message size limit introduced in version 2.8 now works even with clients that do not support the ESMTP "SIZE" parameter. Such (non-compliant) clients still transmit the entire content of their message, but KSP-Mail simply rejects it after transmission, and without using disk space beyond the limit specified; compliant clients, however, cancel the transfer and save transmission time. Enhancement: Mail-Out now uses the ESMTP "SIZE" parameter if the remote host supports it. 2.8: New Feature: Added support for the ESMTP "SIZE" parameter to limit the size of inbound mail messages delivered by ESMTP-compliant clients. The default is no limit, but can be set using the parameter "ksp-mail.max_message_bytes". Bug Fix: Discovered that the Waterloo TCP/IP library routine that reads a line of text from the network failed when the input buffer contained an ASCII NUL. Corrected. 2.7: New Feature: Added parameter "ksp-mail.max_article_days" to limit on how many days the ID of a news article is kept in the POSTED.IDX database file to prevent import of duplicate articles. Default is 14 days. WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL Bug Fix: News-Out was not looking at the first line of the RFC header. If that line was a "From:", "Newgroups:", or "Message-ID:" line, then it would be missed, and the article would be rejected thinking it had a bad RFC header. Bug Fix: News-In was aborting in the middle of a batched outbound news file if the NNTP server rejected an article in the batch because (a) it already has the article, or (b) because the newsgroup is not carried by the server. Corrected. Bug Fix: If outbound news is batched and one or more articles within a batch file had a bad RFC header, News-Out would abort the remainder of the file. Corrected: now it merely bypasses such articles making a notation in the logs, continues posting the good ones, and then renames the .XQT file as a .BAD file. Clean Up: Mail-In now writes a single line at the top (before the RFC header) of each mail message as required by uucp. The format of the line is: "From <sender> <day> <month> <date> <time> <year>" This line can be disabled setting the new configuration parameter "ksp-mail.uucp_from_line" to "disabled". Clean Up: No longer aborts News-Out session when attempt to post article is rejected by remote NNTP server. Clean Up: Reversed the default on "ksp-mail.retrieve_hostnames". The default now is disabled; the parameter may be used to set it to enabled. Enhancement: The pushed version of News-In processed the received news when the newsfeed client issued the "QUIT" command to close the session. However, some Unix newsfeeds never close the connection in an attempt to improve throughput. This leads to timeouts which abort the connection; the newsfeed then reopens a new connection when more news is available to be pushed. The pushed version of News-In now processes the received news when the connection is terminated, whether it's due to a valid QUIT command or a timeout. Enhancement: Added ksp-mail.newnews_timeout to specify how many seconds KSP-Mail will wait for a response to the NEWNEWS command when asking for the list of new articles WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL posted to a newsgroup. This option was added because this time delay can be quite long compared to other time delays when asking for news from a date several days in the past. Enhancement: KSP-Mail kept track of which articles had already been imported in a file called POSTED.NWS; only articles posted to multiple newsgroups and those from a partial newsgroup retrieval were recorded in this file to minimize file size. As articles were imported, new articles were skipped if already imported. Since POSTED.NWS was a "flat" file, searching was sequential and seriously degraded performance near the end of a news pull when there were more than a thousand newsgroups. This file has now been replaced by a B+ database file called POSTED.IDX; all posted article IDs are recorded, and then removed at the end of a newspull if older than all date/time entries in the newsgroups list. Enhancement: KSP-Mail previously detected the presence of DESQview and released time slices to it accordingly, but was not changing the way it painted the screen; corrected. 2.6: Enhancement: Renamed file "NEW-GRPS.LOG" to "GROUPS.NEW" and moved it to the same directory pointed to by ksp-mail.newsgroupslist. Enhancement: Increased the size of files (lists of newsgroups or article ids) that can be sorted by (1) swapping KSP-Mail out of memory while sorting, and (2) creating KSP-SORT.EXE, which sorts larger files than the MS/DOS SORT.EXE program. Enhancement: Added reverse domain name lookup (from IP address) to obtain a reliable identification of the remote host(s). Set "ksp-mail.retrieve_hostnames=disabled" to disable it; default is enabled. Enhancement: KSP-Mail is now "OS/2 aware". I.e., it no longer uses 100% of the cpu time, but rather it now releases the cpu to other processes when it's not busy. New Feature: KSP-Mail will now optionally creates a zero-byte file on a periodic basis as an indication that everything is still ok. This allows you to setup a batch file on another machine that continuously checks the date stamp on the file and issues an alarm if it has been more than a certain amount of time since the file was last WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL created. (See "ksp-mail.ok_filespec".) New Feature: Remote system management. Now you can telnet into KSP-Mail from a remote location to modify or view a large number of operating parameters! This replaces the old "HELP STATUS" and "RSET STATUS" commands with a whole new set of "extended" commands, and accordingly, the old "ksp-mail.status_password" configuration parameter has been renamed to "ksp-mail.remote_management_password". Since the extended commands permit run-time modification of operating parameters, they are disabled unless (1) the password has been specified, and (2) the remote client has identified itself to KSP-Mail at login with "HELO <password>". See the new chapter in KSP-MAIL.DOC on remote system management for more information. New Feature: News-In now is able to run as a receive-only NNTP server. This allows KSP-Mail to receive inbound news via a news "feed" rather than polling a remote NNTP server. Receiving a news feed is known as the "push" method, and significantly reduces the load on the remote machine compared to "pulling" news. If configuration parameter "ksp-mail.newsgroups" is defined, then News-In runs as a client and pulls news; otherwise it runs as a server and waits for a news feed client to push. See KSP-MAIL.DOC for further information. Enhancement: The "ksp-mail.news_hour" parameter now supports a list of hours, separated by commas; a range of hours may also be specified by using a dash. For example, ksp-mail.news_hour=2,4,6,7-12,20-22 New Feature: Retrieval of hundreds of newgroups is not uncommon, and can take several hours to complete. Since no external UUCP import/export programs are allowed to run until all TCP/IP processes (e.g., News-In) are idle, this situation can seriously delay import/export of mail and news. In this version, if the ",sort" option is appended to the end of the parameter "ksp-mail.newsgroups", then News-In will be suspended at the end of the current newsgroup if an external program is waiting to be executed. Note that if "ksp-mail.news_import_trigger" is set to "on_arrival", then this allows external programs to be executed between each pair of newsgroups. Enhancement: Created less-confusing aliases for the following configuration parameters: WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL Original Parameter Name Alternative Parameter Name ---------------------------- -------------------------- ksp-mail.bbsmail2uucp_command ksp-mail.export_mail_command ksp-mail.bbsmail2uucp_seconds ksp-mail.export_mail_seconds ksp-mail.bbsmail2uucp_trigger ksp-mail.export_mail_trigger ksp-mail.bbsnews2uucp_command ksp-mail.export_news_command ksp-mail.bbsnews2uucp_seconds ksp-mail.export_news_seconds ksp-mail.uucp2bbsmail_command ksp-mail.import_mail_command ksp-mail.uucp2bbsmail_seconds ksp-mail.import_mail_seconds ksp-mail.uucp2bbsmail_trigger ksp-mail.import_mail_trigger ksp-mail.uucp2bbsnews_command ksp-mail.import_news_command ksp-mail.uucp2bbsnews_trigger ksp-mail.import_news_trigger Enhancement: Created additional configuration parameter aliases as follows, with a new ability to specify different NNTP servers for News-In and News-Out: Original Parameter Name Alternative Parameter Name ---------------------------- -------------------------- ksp-mail.nntp_server ksp-mail.news_server, or ksp-mail.news_in_server, or ksp-mail.news_out_server ksp-mail.smtp_server ksp-mail.mail_server, or ksp-mail.mail_out_server Enhancement: Added six additional configuration parameters that enable/disable individual processes and report any missing parameters required by those processes. See KSP-MAIL.DOC for more information. ksp-mail.import_news_process ksp-mail.import_news_process ksp-mail.import_mail_process ksp-mail.export_news_process ksp-mail.export_mail_process ksp-mail.command_shell_process ksp-mail.set_clock_process Enhancement: If an SMTP or NNTP server rejects an outbound message, the original message preceded by an appropriate explanation is returned to the sender. New Feature: Added "ksp-mail.smtp_greeting" to allow you to add your own text to the login greeting message presented by Mail-In to the remote client. This parameter may be repeated for multi-line messages. WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL New Feature: Added a new configuration parameter called "ksp-mail.exit_spec=<filespec>[,<seconds>]". If used, KSP-Mail will periodically check for a file matching <filespec>. If found, KSP-Mail deletes the file and then exits as soon as it reaches a stable state, with an error code given by the three-character filename extension. The <filespec> string may contain wildcards. The <seconds> parameter is optional and specifies how frequently the check is made; default is once every 10 seconds. For example, with "ksp-mail.exit_spec=c:\ksp\ksp-exit.*,5" the file c:\ksp\ksp-exit.015 will cause KSP-Mail to exit with an error code of 15. New Feature: Some NNTP servers require the client to login with a username and password. Since such commands are not part of the NNTP standard, they have been added to KSP-Mail as strings separated by commas and appended to the end of the "ksp-mail.nntp_server" configuration entry, as in: ksp-mail.nntp_server=129.210.212.20,<string>,<string>,... where, for example, "<string>" might be: authinfo user ksp or: authinfo pass babyface If blanks appear within one or more of the commands (as in these examples), then everything after the "=" sign must be surrounded by a pair of quotation marks. This feature can be used in the specification of SMTP (but not TIME) servers as well. Bug Fix: Mail-Out wasn't handling outbound mailing lists properly. It used the "To:" field in the RFC header of the message instead of the recipient list in the .XQT file. Corrected. Bug Fix: UUCP sometimes puts a "From ..." line in an outbound mail message or news article at the top before the RFC header. This line is not a legal RFC header line and was not being removed. Corrected. Bug Fix: Outbound mail or news with either a "To:" or "From:" line of the format: John Smith (King of the Road) <jsmith@nowhere.com> WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL would cause the address parser that extracts "jsmith@nowhere.com" to fail. Corrected. Bug Fix: Use of domain names instead of IP addresses for SMTP, NNTP, or TIME servers corrupted memory which caused failures later while importing newsgroups. Corrected. 2.5: New Feature: If a timeout occurs in the middle of retrieving articles from some newsgroup, a list of those that have already been retrieved will be recorded in a file so that they will not be retrieved again. New Feature: If you add ",sort" after the filename specified by ksp-mail.newsgroups, then KSP-Mail will sort the file before retrieval so that it attempts to get the oldest news first. New Feature: Added a new configuration parameter called "ksp-mail.close_timeout" to limit the amount of time used to close a connection independent of other limits specified by "sockdelay" and "server_timeout". Default is 10 seconds. Bug Fix: If no *.XQT files were in the spool directory, it would sometimes die with an error message saying "out of file handles". Corrected. 2.4: Enhancement: You no longer have to change the TZ environment variable string when Daylight Savings Time (DST) begins or ends. If the TZ environment string includes a DST suffix (e.g., "SET TZ=PST8PDT"), then KSP-Mail will now automatically set the clock ahead one hour at 2am on the first Sunday in April and back one hour at 2am on the last Sunday in October. If TZ does *NOT* include a DST suffix (e.g., "SET TZ=PST8"), then the clock will not be changed. Enhancement: Added a new configuration parameter called "ksp-mail.outbound_retry_seconds". If posting an outbound mail message or news article fails due to a timeout while waiting for the remote server to reply, KSP-Mail now delays for the amount of time specified by this parameter. Enhancement: News-Out tries to post an article using the "POST" NNTP command; if that is refused, it now tries the "IHAVE" command. WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL Enhancement: If Mail-Out or News-Out encountered any problem while trying to post a message or article, the corresponding .XQT file was renamed to .BAD, even if the problem was not due to errors in the file itself. (E.g., a server timeout would also result in the file being renamed.) Now, Mail-Out and News-Out only rename the file if there is actually something wrong with its contents; this allows the file to be resent at a later time. Clean Up: News-In: Eliminated the "skipping cross-posted article.." message-In, and the cross-posted article from the total number of articles to be retrieved for that newsgroup. Improved the algorithm that detects feedback articles; rather than importing and then discarding, they are no longer imported. Bug Fix: Running external commands would sometimes cause KSP-Mail to crash if swapping was allowed. Corrected. 2.3: Bug Fix: While cleaning up the code for version 2.2, I accidentally reversed the sense of a test which broke the new code that gets a list of new newsgroups (not new articles) from the NNTP server. Corrected. 2.2: Enhancement: News-In article list no longer sorted if there's only one article in the list. <g> Bug Fix: If the response to the NEWNEWS command of News-In was a list of articles containing only a single entry, that article was not retrieved; corrected. 2.1: Bug Fix: At the end of a news retrieval, the date and time computed for the next retrieval was incorrect. Corrected. 2.0: MAJOR NEW RELEASE: This is the successor to version 1.8, and has been numbered 2.0 rather than 1.9 because it incorporates a large number of significant improvements, new features, and bug fixes. Configuration Change: Previous versions kept a single time and date record of the last news retrieval in a file called NEWS-IN.LST; there was only one date and time recorded for all newgroups. Retrieving articles for any one group can take several minutes, so it became necessary to record the time and date on a group-by-group basis. This version eliminates the NEW-IN.LST file and replaces the "ksp-mail.newsgroup" configuration parameter by: WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL ksp-mail.newsgroups=<filespec> as in: ksp-mail.newsgroups=c:\ksp\groups.lst Note the added 's' at the end of "newsgroups". As indicated, this new parameter requires a filespec (without a leading '@'). The file contains one line per newsgroup (no wildcards); each entry consists of a GMT date and time followed by the newgroup name, with fields separated by exactly one space: YYMMDD HHMMSS newgroup_name as in: 951001 120012 alt.bbs.internet Note: If you want to sort this new newsgroup list by name, use the following DOS command: SORT /+14 < infile > outfile where "infile" is the name of the unsorted newsgroup list and "outfile" is the name of the sorted list. Note: If you create an entry where the newsgroup name has been replaced by the IP address of your NNTP server, as in: 951001 120012 137.168.1.1 then KSP-Mail will record new newsgroups whenever they are created on the server! The list of new newsgroups will be added to the end of a log file called NEW-GRPS.LOG in your log directory. If you have multiple NNTP servers, just create one line for each server with the corresponding IP addresses. New Feature: A Set-Clock thread has been added. It uses a time server on the Internet to set the time and date of the KSP-Mail machine. To use it, you must specify one or more time servers using "ksp-mail.time_server"; you may also want to set how often the clock is set using "ksp-mail.set_clock_hours" (the default is once every 24 hours). WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL New Feature: You may now include more than one NNTP server in your WATTCP.CFG file. If the first NNTP server is not available, KSP-Mail will try the second, and so on. Also, if one or more of the specified newsgroups is not carried by a server, KSP-Mail will attempt to retrieve the missing newsgroups from the remaining servers in the list. New Feature: The SMTP server implemented by the Mail-In processes now supports an extension of SMTP's standard "HELP" and "RSET" commands that can be used to remotely retrieve information about the current status of KSP-Mail via telnet; see chapter five of KSP-MAIL.DOC for details. Access to these commands can be password protected using a new configuration parameter called "ksp-mail.status_password". New Feature: UUCP export utilities usually use temporary names while creating the spool files and then rename those files after they have been completely written. However, occassionally this design practice is not followed, and can cause a "file sharing violation" when other software (such as KSP-Mail) is trying to read these files. As a workaround, a new configuration parameter called "ksp-mail.share_delay_seconds" has been added to cause KSP-Mail to delay before actually trying to process the file. If set properly, this should allow the UUCP utility time to finish writing to the file, thus avoiding the access conflict. Enhancement: Pressing Esc once now exits only if all processes are idle. Pressing it twice exits after gracefully completing any transfer in progress. Pressing it three times aborts and exits immediately. Enhancement: Additional information related to News-In and News-Out is now displayed on the Summary Screen. (1) the current NNTP server's IP address, (2) the current and total number of newsgroups being retrieved, (3) the current and total number of articles in the current group, and (4) the time and date of the previous retrieval for the current group. Enhancement: News-In now sorts the list of article id's returned by the "NEWNEWS" command before retrieving the articles. This helps keep multi-part postings (e.g., part1 of 3, part 2 of 3, etc.) in the proper order. (Note: KSP-Mail loads and executes the DOS "SORT" command, which must be in the current path.) WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL Enhancement: News-In now retrieves articles using the faster "ARTICLE" command rather than the slower "HEAD" and "BODY" commands. Enhancement: News-In now uses the "SLAVE" command to tell the NNTP server that KSP-Mail provides news to more than one person; this command is ignored by most servers, but a few may give you higher priority. Clean Up: Version 1.8 added a new feature to facilitate mail forwarding: the full email destination address (including the domain name) was written to the UUCP *.X file when the domain name was different from that of the KSP-Mail machine. Some UUCP utilities can't forward mail and thus accept nothing more than a user name. A new configuration parameter (ksp-mail.forwarding=enabled) has been added to solve this problem; if not used, only the user name will be written to the *.X file. THIS PARAMETER MUST BE ENABLED IF YOU WANT MAIL FOR ANOTHER DOMAIN NAME TO BE FORWARDED. Bug Fix: Mail-In was not properly handling a single inbound mail message posted to multiple recipients; it only delivered a copy to the recipient specified with the last (of multiple) "RCPT TO" command sent by the remote SMTP client. Corrected. Bug Fix: The "NEWNEWS" command issued by the News-In process to the remote NNTP server did not specify the "GMT" option (Greenich Mean Time); corrected. Bug Fix: When articles were cross-posted to more than one newsgroup, duplicate entries would be posted by the uucp utilities to the BBS message base. Corrected. 1.8: New Feature: KSP-Mail now handles outbound news that has been batched by the UUCP software. Such files contain one or more news articles, each preceded within the same file by a line like "#! rnews <number>". Most NNTP servers can handle this anyway, but some do not. New Feature: Some UUCP software (like GIGO) can handle .XQT files that contain a line like "rmail dan.lewis@ksp.com"; such software uses the domain name information to implement mail forwarding. Less powerful UUCP software (e.g., UUIN) tolerates nothing more than a user name, such as "rmail dan.lewis", assuming that all incoming mail is for the local machine. KSP-Mail has been modified so that now if the domain name part of the WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL destination address of an inbound e-mail message matches that of the KSP-Mail machine (as configured in WATTCP), then the domain name information is removed as before; otherwise it is passed to the UUCP software on the rmail command line in the .XQT file. Bug Fix: External commands that required loading a second copy of COMMAND.COM, such as .BAT files, or commands with command line redirection or piping would fail. Corrected. Bug Fix: Discovered a bug in the Waterloo TCP/IP library function that reads a line of text from the network. This caused KSP-Mail to freeze if a client SMTP process submitted an e-mail message containing a line longer than 1024 characters. Corrected. Bug Fix: If the Mail-In process was disabled (no mail directory specified), none of the other processes were able to borrow one of the four network resources needed to function. Corrected. Clean Up: The Mail-In process' response to a "HELP" command issued by the remote SMTP client was double-spaced; corrected. Clean Up: Initiated process activity woke up the screen saver, but sometimes the moving screen saver string "KSP-Mail" would be written on top of the restored summary screen; corrected. 1.7: Bug Fix: If the "From:" line of the RFC header on an outbound mail message or news article appeared before the "To:" line (as opposed to the other way around), KSP-Mail would issue the error message, "Bad RFC header in file ...". Corrected. 1.6: Bug Fix: When swapping to EMS, the code that releases the allocated EMS memory (after KSP-Mail's memory image is restored) was not working. This caused EMS memory to eventually be depleted. Corrected. Enhancement: If an error occured during processing of outbound mail or news, the corresponding uucp spool files for that message would be left in the spool directory, causing KSP-Mail to try over and over again to export them. This has been corrected by renaming the corresponding .XQT file with the extension .BAD. WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL Clean Up: Forgot to document the need to set your TZ (timezone) environment variable. The time standard for both SMTP and NNTP is Greenwich Mean Time; the TZ environment variable tells KSP-Mail how to convert your local time to GMT time. If you don't create this environment variable, KSP-Mail will think (by default) that you are on Pacific Standard Time (PST)! See details in section 1.6 of KSP-MAIL.DOC. New Feature: Added support for an environment variable (ksp-ip) to set the IP address. Since the IP address is often the only parameter in WATTCP.CFG that changes from one BBS node to another, this allows using a single copy of that file for all nodes. Clarification: Some Internet access providers configure their dial-up slip and ppp accounts with a very small segment size. You may need to set mss as low as 212 if your Internet connection is through such a connection. 1.5: Bug Fix: If an error occured when trying to execute an external command, the command line displayed in the error message did not show anything after the first command line parameter, even though all parameters were used; corrected. Bug Fix: The search algorithm for locating an external command would fail if a complete pathspec for the command was provided; corrected. Clean Up: The documentation and the sample configuration file used an example command line for PCBoard's UUIN that looked like "UUIN -c 5". UUIN does not support this command line parameter; it should have been shown using the "-s" parameter, as in "UUIN -S SMTP" or "UUIN -S NNTP". Corrected. Clean Up: If external commands were specified in the configuration file, they would trigger even if the corresponding process (Mail-In, Mail-Out, News-In, News-Out) was disabled. Corrected. 1.4: New Feature: Added a new configuration parameter to disable certain options when swapping out memory in order to run an external command. The parameter "ksp-mail.dont_swap_to" can be set to "xms", "ems", or "disk". One or more swapping options may be disabled; if all are disabled then KSP-Mail's memory image will not be swapped out. WHAT'S NEW IN KSP-MAIL Oops! When I fixed the search algorithm in 1.3, I accidentally broke the "include" directive in WATTCP.CFG. Corrected. Bug Fix: Had a problem parsing a command line to execute when it did not contain any command line options; corrected. 1.3: Enhancement: KSP-Mail now looks in three directories to locate the WATTCP.CFG configuration file. First, it checks for an environment variable called WATTCP.CFG that specifies the directory. Second, it looks in the current (default) directory. Third, if still not found, it looks in the directory that contains the executable (KSP-MAIL.EXE). Enhancement: Added a screen saver and an associated configuration parameter (ksp-mail.screen_saver_seconds) to control its timing. 1.2: Some UUCP import/export utility programs (notably Clark Development's UUOUT) apparently require LOTS of memory to run. Since KSP-Mail uses about 230K itself, that made it impossible to load and execute some of these programs. KSP-Mail now copies its memory image to XMS memory, EMS memory, or a file (in that order of preference), and then shrinks down to a tiny "stub" of around 2kb before trying to load and execute a program. When the child program terminates, KSP-Mail reloads its image and continues. 1.1: The documentation forgot to mention an important detail about the following four configuration parameters that specify MS/DOS command lines! ksp-mail.uucp2bbsmail_command ksp-mail.bbsmail2uucp_command ksp-mail.bbsnews2uucp_command ksp-mail.uucp2bbsnews_command If the command line text includes any spaces, then the entire text of the command line must be surrounded by quotation marks, as in: ksp-mail.bbsmail2uucp_command="UUOUT -C 5" 1.0: Initial release.