Articles

A WeIrD WaY tO Do MaIl :)
By Frank Vest
1:124/6308(.1)

You can bet that if there is a way to do something with a computer, someone in Fidonet has done it.... especially if it's not "normal". :)

As I believe I wrote in an article earlier, I have set up a small peer to peer LAN in my house. There are four computers connected to it. This will deal with the BBS system and my personal system that I "Point" off of.

I've wanted to use the LAN to handle mail to and from my Point since I first got the LAN going. I know there are many ways to do this, but I'll share how I did it just in case it might help someone.

The BBS runs on a Dos box. It does ok with that and handles the LAN fairly well. The one problem I have had is that if I access the Dos box from the other systems, the Dos box will lock the next time Frontdoor exits for any reason. :( This ended the idea of just copying files to and from the Dos box. Since I have my registered copy of Internet Rex, I thought of running a second copy of it on the Point machine and doing the Point mail that way, but there's that locking problem again. The copy would be to and from the Dos box. :(

Here' the way I'm doing the mail to/from my Point with PPoint;

In PPoint, remove the lines in the "mailer.bat" file. Leave the file as an empty shell. or put some "echo" commands in there with smart sayings if you wish... whatever... just don't let it call Binkley to poll for mail. When you start PPoint, use the /P option to force it to poll for mail on start up.

I know that sounds dumb, but there is a method to my madness. :)

In Irex, add your Point address in the Node Manager. Have Irex toss to a directory and from a directory. In the configure portion of each, put the inbound directory and outbound directory path for each respectively. Make sure you put a trailing backslash.

In my setup, viewing from the Dos box (BBS machine), PPoint's inbound is g:\ppoint\in\ and the outbound is g:\ppoint\out\

What happens:

When PPoint is started, it polls for mail (the \P option). If there is any mail in the inbound, it is tossed from the "in" directory for PPoint and any outbound mail is tossed to the "out" directory for Irex to pick up. There's no accessing the Dos box and, therefore, no lockups. :)

When Irex runs, any mail in PPoint's outbound directory is picked up and placed in your mailer's inbound and any mail for your point is placed in PPoint's inbound directory. Irex also clears the files in the "out" directory so that there are no dupes. PPoint takes care of the "in" directory.

When you finish reading your mail, you can run a "poll" (now you should understand why the "mailer.bat" was edited to an empty file :) and any replies you have made will be tossed to the "out" directory for Irex to pick up on it's next run and if there is any new mail in the "in" directory since your last poll, it will be processed for you to read/reply.

Yes, it's a strange and weird way to do it, but it is working so far. :-))

As with all things Fido, this is just how I do it. YMMV and I give no guarantees that it will work for you. :)

Have fun in Fidonet,

Frank