From: dje@sspiff.UUCP (Doug Evans)
Subject: Re: FTP by mail
Organization: Edmonton, Alberta
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1992 02:12:41 GMT

jprevost@visual.spk.wa.us (Jack Prevost) writes:
>What about the poor souls like me who AREN'T directly connected?  I was
>looking forward to the answer for that question!

I have found that ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com is quite picky about what
you put in "reply" (reply is a command you can include in requests).
Of course, it's entirely reasonable to believe that
not having a "real" email address was the culprit. It took months to finally
get a request satisfied (I'd wait at least 2 weeks before concluding that the
request wasn't going to work, so in two months that's only 4 attempts!).
The problem was getting the return email address right (I think).

The original poster got *something* back so something weird must have
been going on. Maybe an upstream site wasn't forwarding the requested sources?
(Just a wild guess).

-------------

You can try sending a message consisting solely of "help" (no sigs!!!)
to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com but that won't necessarily work. If the message
header on the way to the server gets munged in anyway (mine do, by my mail
feed), then the server may not be able to find you (IE: The reply may get sent,
but gets hung up somewhere). I also wonder whether it checks the reply address
to see if the message has a prayer of getting there. Somebody?

So, for those kindred spirits in the fringes of the net, here is something
hopefully useful ...

>From: bnelson@csulx.weber.edu (Bert Nelson)
>Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
>Subject: FTPing through E-mail
>Message-ID: <1992Jan15.050951.18295@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
>Date: 15 Jan 92 05:09:51 GMT
>Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
>Organization: Weber State University, Ogden Utah
>Lines: 98
>
>
>Many of those out in netland have requested that I mail them a copy
>of my recent game, because their over-zealous system adminstrators do
>not allow FTP at their site.  And that's not too bad but when scores of people
>make the same request it becomes a little overwhelming.
>
>There is another way!
>
>Try using ftpmail.  Send e-mail to 'ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com', with the
>word 'help' as the only word in the message body, and a null subject
>header.  It will tell you how to use ftpmail.  (The syntax for ftpmail
>is very similar to FTP itself, although ftpmail operates using e-mail,
>and thus is not interactive, unlike FTP.)  This works for any hosts
>with e-mail access to the Internet, even from FidoNet!
> 
>
>The contents of help for ftpmail from the above site is below. 
>
>>>> this help file was last edited on 08-August-1991
>>>>
>>>> commands are:
>
>	reply <MAILADDR>	set reply addr, since headers are usually wrong
>	connect [HOST [USER [PASS]]]  defaults to gatekeeper.dec.com, anonymous
>	ascii			files grabbed are printable ascii
>	binary			files grabbed are compressed or tar or both
>	chdir PLACE		"get" and "ls" commands are relative to PLACE
>					(only one CHDIR per ftpmail session)
>	compress		compress binaries using Lempel-Ziv encoding
>	compact			compress binaries using Huffman encoding
>	uuencode		binary files will be mailed in uuencode format
>	btoa			binary files will be mailed in btoa format
>	ls (or dir) PLACE	short (long) directory listing
>	get FILE		get a file and have it mailed to you
>	quit			terminate script, ignore rest of mail message
>					(use if you have a .signature or
>					 are a VMSMAIL user)
>
>>>> notes:
>
>	-> you must give a "connect" command, default host is
>	   gatekeeper.dec.com, default user is anonymous, default
>	   password is your mail address.
>
>	-> binary files will not be compressed unless 'compress' or 'compact'
>	   command is given; use this if at all possible, it helps a lot.
>
>	-> binary files will always be formatted into printable ASCII
>	   with "btoa" or "uuencode" (default is "btoa").
>
>	-> all retrieved files will be split into 60KB chunks and mailed.
>
>	-> VMS/DOS/Mac versions of uudecode, atob, compress and compact
>	   are available, ask your LOCAL wizard about them if you can't
>	   locate them (but try gatekeeper.dec.com in /archive/pub/VMS
>	   if you're still trapped on a VMS system.)
>
>	-> several mail unsplitters are hiding on gatekeeper.dec.com in
>	   /pub/mail/ua/misc/unsplit.  includes one in c, one in perl,
>	   and one in VMS DCL.
>
>>>> examples:
>
>	-> connect to gatekeeper.dec.com and get a root directory listing:
>
>		connect
>		ls
>		quit
>
>	-> connect to gatekeeper.dec.com and get the README.ftp file:
>
>		connect
>		get README.ftp
>		quit
>
>	-> connect to gatekeeper.dec.com and get the gnuemacs sources:
>
>		connect
>		binary
>		chdir /pub/GNU
>		get emacs-18.57.tar.Z
>		quit
>
>	-> connect to uunet.uu.net as anonymous and get a root directory list:
>
>		connect uunet.uu.net
>		dir
>		quit
>
>  -- Ftpmail Submission Transcript --
><<< help
>>>> Help is on the way.
>
>
>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 
>Bert Nelson              	"On a clear disk you can seek forever"
>Weber State University   	Anonymous
>bnelson@csulx.weber.edu
-- 
Doug Evans                   |
..!{canada,uunet}!sspiff!dje | Vancouver 11, Calgary 0
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