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Cream of the Crop 21 (Terry Blount) (October 1996).iso
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$Id: readme 1.6 1996/09/02 13:31:33 hardy Exp $
THIS PROGRAM IS HEAVILY BASED ON IDEAS/MODULES/DOCS FROM CHIN HUANGs
(cthuang@io.org) SOUPER15. THANKS TO HIM. ALSO FOR YARN/2.
This means, that bug reports and everything else concerning VSoup
should be directed to Hardy Griech (rgriech@ibm.net, no Chin Huang!
VSoup is free software. See COPYING disclaimer of the FSF for
details. Note that you are not allowed to distribute VSoup without
source code.
Purpose
=======
VSoup is a network mail and news client program for OS/2 Warp's
Internet Access Kit. It transfers mail and news fetched from a POP3
server and NNTP server respectively to SOUP format. It can also send
messages in SOUP reply packets to NNTP/SMTP servers
Currently there are no man pages for VSoup. The man pages from
souper15 and the usage message should be enough (temporary).
The program requires the emx run-time DLLs. You can get these from
ftp://ftp-os2.nmsu.edu/os2/unix/emx09b/emxrt.zip
Features
========
- receiving news from NNTP, posting news to NNTP, receiving mail from
POP3, sending mail to SMTP
- all the packets are exchanged in SOUP format files
- multi-threaded news receiving
- status mail generation (this is not in SOUP standard, but
recognized by YARN). The generation can be forced via command line
option, standard is to generate mail in case of failure or on new
newsgroups (-a option)
- detects time-out condition for news receiving
- URLs on command line for easy specification of the several servers
- example (!) script to do VSoup operation safely (without risc of
message loss etc.)
CmdLine
=======
Common command options
----------------------
-h dir set the home directory for the VSoup operation. You can
also specify your home directory through the environment
variable HOME
-i ignore the settings of the 'Internet Connection for OS/2'
settings
-m do not fetch mail
-M generate the VSoup status mail in any case. Standard is
to generate the message in case of error only.
-n do not fetch news
-r read only mode. Except the *.msg ./areas, ./*.msg ./*.idx
no files are written (e.g. ~/newstime, ~/newsrc). Also
the mails are not deleted from the POP3 server. Main
purpose for this option is debugging.
-s send replies. -s might be combined with the -m,-n option,
but this feature is ignored!
News receiving options
----------------------
-a add new newsgroups to newsrc file. If there are any new
groups on the server, then the generation of the status
message will be forced.
-c[n] catchup: mark every article as read except for the last n
(default is 10).
-k n set maximum news packet size to n KBytes (default is no
limit). N means the total amount of received messages,
not the size of a single message (see -l)
-K file set the name of the kill file (see note below...)
-l n set the maximum length of news you like to receive. This
is intended for omitting binaries in text groups.
-N file set the name of the newsrc file (see note below...)
-t n receive the news with 'n' threads, i.e. connect to the NNTP
server 'n' times
-u create news summary. Output can be found in the ./*.IDX
files. Be aware that the summarized articles are marked
as read (one way to get out of this, is to call VSoup with
-r)
-x do not process news Xref headers
-K,-N,-h
--------
I do not recommend to use these options, because behavior is not very
transparent if you are using also '-h'. If the '-h' is behind the
'-K/-N' the result will be another as expected - vsoup (and souper)
will revert to 'kill' and 'newsrc'; if '-K/-N' are behind the '-h' and
do not contain absolute pathes, the will not be located in the by '-h'
specified home directory. This is confusing and will be fixed in a
future release. IT IS BETTER AND CLEANER TO USE -h AND SETUP THE
SPECIAL KILL/NEWSRC FILES IN THAT DIRECTORY!
URLs
----
The addresses of the hosts are given in URL form. These confirms not
absolutely to the standard, so a short explanation follows:
- 'nntp://[UserId[:Password]@]nntp-host' defines the address of your
NNTP server. UserId and Password can be given if required for
AUTHINFO.
- 'pop3://[UserId[:Password]@]pop3-host' defines the address of your
POP3 server. UserId and Password are usually required.
- 'smtp://[userid[:password]@]smtp-gateway' defines your SMTP
gateway. UserId and Password are not required, in fact they are
ignored by VSoup!
This feature makes VSoup dfferent to souper16, which wants to see a
~/newsauth file.
Ah ja: it is not intended to implement other protocols like http or
so...
Environment
===========
HOME your home directory (can also be specified in the command
line)
NNTPSERVER hostname of the nntp server (can also be specified in the
command line)
Diagnostics
===========
VSoup returns with an exit code of '1', if any operation failed.
Otherwise return code will be '0'.
Evaluation Order Of URLs
========================
Evaluation order is as follows:
(1) take all information from the 'Internet Connection for OS/2'
settings
(2) check the NNTPSERVER environment settings (yes, there are no vars
for the SMTP/POP3 setup). NNTPSERVER is a URL without leading
'nntp://'
(3) command line options
If you specify only e.g. 'nntp://news-server' in the command line
(without userid/password), the userid/password from the OS/2 settings
are taken as a standard value.
News Reception
==============
for news reception you have the following options (which cannot
combined): either process ./commands (./commands exists), or catch-up
the newsgroups (-c option) or create newsgroups summary (-u option) or
receive the news in the standard way (no specific option). New
newsgroups are added only to the ~/newsrc file, if news received in
the standard way.
Helper
======
There is a REXX script packed into this archive. The script is just
intended as an example and must be adapted to your special needs. If
somebody wants to make the configuration easier, she/he is welcome.
yarnio.cmd: control IO of VSoup to YARN. News are read from two
NNTP servers, mail/news are transmitted, mail is
received - all simultaneously. The cmd should be
started by the dialer directly after connection has
been established. Sorry, but the directory structure
must be adapted manually!
Files
=====
~/newsrc: contains the newsgroups. ':' behind the name
indicates subscribed group, '!' indicates an
unsubscribed one
./commands: contains lines with the syntax: 'sendme' <groupname>
<article-nums>. ./commands is executed instead of
standard fetching of news. After successful
'commands'-processing, the file will be deleted.
Note: already read articles (marked in ~/newsrc) will
be skipped!
~/kill: is the kill file. Note: news transmission speed
decreases if a kill file is used, because then an
article is fetched in two steps: HEAD <num>, then BODY
<num>. Otherwise an article will be fetched in only
one step: ARTICLE <num>
~/newstime: contains the time of the last NNTP connection. This
is for fetching of new newsgroups. If ~/newstime does
not exist, ALL currently available newsgroups are
fetched from the server. Applicable only, if VSoup
was called with the '-a' paramet