From: kjhoule@iowegia.uucp (Kevin Houle)
Newsgroups: comp.bbs.waffle
Subject: Re: .QWK mail reader for Waffle
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 21:22:13 CST
Distribution: world
Organization: Iowegia Public Access Usenet/UUCP, Clive IA USA.

jhood@smoke.marlboro.vt.us (and the eyes in his head see the World spinning roun writes:

> At least I think it's not.  I don't think grubbing through a newsgroup
> or echo without some kind of net software is convenient or even worth
> the bother.  I would describe an offline reader as some kind of
> software that conveniently handles reading messages and replying to
> them, relying on the connectivity and addressability of a remote host,
> and intended for a single user.  An offline reader system also allows
> for downloading selected batches of messages on an irregular basis,
> and doesn't require regular polling, like a UUCP system.

I couldn't agree with you more on your definition of an off-line
reader system.

> Waffle/DOS doesn't meet that criterion; nor does downloading messages,
> reading them, hand-crafting replies, and uploading them into a BBS.

Granted.

> The format of rnews batches would work OK for downloading messages to
> an off-line reader, but doesn't handle the problem of uploaded news or
> mail, which must pick up some new headers and whatnot at the remote
> host.  And software that produces rnews batches now is oriented
> towards uucp feeds, and not towards interactive selection and capture
> of message batches.

Rnews format works great for downloading messages. The rnews batches you
speak of are typically Unix-compressed batches of pretty much random
articles. I began an educational experience a few months ago that shows
software can be written to produce rnews batches for readers based on
interative selection (or rather, join file selection...)

     [ Usenet : comp.bbs.waffle ] > solar
     SOLAR v0.23 : Copyright (C) 1992, 1993  Kevin J. Houle

     Processing newsgroup : comp.bbs.misc : Last read = 1495
     -= New articles found : 6 : Batching......

     Processing newsgroup : comp.bbs.waffle : Last read = 4946
     -= New articles found : 9 : Batching.........

     Processing newsgroup : rec.humor.funny : Last read = 728
     -= New articles found : 8 : Batching........

     Total articles batched : 23
     Total bytes batched    : 47437

     Compress news <Y or N> ? y

     Success : Last read pointers updated.

What does this create? A .zip file containing one file in rnews format
for each newsgroup, and one controlling index file looking like so :

comp.bbs.misc 98.NWS 6
comp.bbs.waffle 99.NWS 9
rec.humor.funny 100.NWS 8

A single .exe file reader, no big sprawling UUCP setup with directories
all over the place, uses this index to access rnews batch files. The
byte information in the '#! rnews' lines is used to seek out articles.
Now, the problems you speak of, mail and replies, I haven't dealt with
yet, but the whole concept is seeming very feasible.

> But then, what's 'READMAIL'?

It's a reader I picked up from Halcyon a while back, RMAIL401.ZIP. It
handles Unix-style messages, QWK, Usenet, etc. Only reads, tho, no
replies. And it tends to interpret an rnews batch-format file as one big
long Usenet article rather than multiple articles.

--
Kevin Houle     kjhoule@iowegia.uucp