Text of TeleFinder Chat from Friday, March 6, 1998 11 AM PST.
In attendance:
From Spider Island: Rusty Tucker
Sysops: Jim Smith, Bill Gram-Reefer, Donald McHose, Kevin Shearon, Brian Akey, mikael fredriksson, Bob Nunn, Jim DeHaven, Michael Davidson, Jim Leary
Rusty Tucker hola!
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Jim Smith!
Jim Smith Hi.
Rusty Tucker I'm testing out the HTML chat logger today.
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Bill Gram-Reefer!
Bill Gram-Reefer smart-ass bot
Rusty Tucker I've seen some sample Applescript that will read tab-delimited files..
Rusty Tucker that should be useful for randomizing the greetings
Rusty Tucker I've taught my bot to clean up my **** language too
Bill Gram-Reefer great, a bot with a vocabulary!
Rusty Tucker I can't say **** without this guy censoring me
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Kevin Shearon!
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Donald McHose!
Rusty Tucker I thought we'd have a better turn out, looks like a few stragglers out there.
Donald McHose Thank you Rusty!
Kevin Shearon Rusty, have you had any occurrences of Macjordomo email messages having part of the email clipped near the end when it sends files using TF's POP email server?
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Brian Akey!
Brian Akey Hey!
Rusty Tucker No KS, I haven't.
Kevin Shearon any ideas why some long emails have some of the email clipped at the end?
Brian Akey Is it the 32k problem
Kevin Shearon using our Listserver (Macjordomo)
Rusty Tucker Recently I had a report of some mail from a Pegasus mailer were clipped. It was due to a malformed message containing nulls. This caused MS to think a new message was appearing in a
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Michael Davidson!
Brian Akey Rusty have you added mail forward in tfuser
Rusty Tucker Maybe MJ has a some sort of message size limit?
Rusty Tucker Not yet BA, but its on the list.
Kevin Shearon they aren't extremely long emails, maybe one 8 1/2 x 11 page size
Brian Akey I had a user trying to sent a 53 meg file and they couldn't understand why it was locking up their mail client
Rusty Tucker Their mailer can't handle that?
Rusty Tucker Has anyone had a chance to experiment with Chat scripting?
Michael Davidson I looked at it Rusty, but never scripted anything.
Michael Davidson Also, I misunderstood you about the Mini Scripts
Rusty Tucker how's that?
Brian Akey The mail program goes until the machine runs out of memory.
Michael Davidson I thought you were going to have a scripting menu that you could pull down to access the scripts from inside TF/User
Michael Davidson memory or storage BA
Brian Akey Bob told me about the scripting and it looks real cool.
Brian Akey System memory
Rusty Tucker Yes, at some point there will be a script menu, but for now you need to launch them from Finder. They still work the same either
Michael Davidson That's strange BA
Brian Akey The mail server seemed to be ok but in the past I have had problems with mail messages over 20 meg.
Michael Davidson Ok, definitely would be nicer in a script menu though
Rusty Tucker Yep, more convenient for sure.
Michael Davidson Should be a special name for the Scripts folder inside the TF/User folder
Brian Akey People are sending bigger messages because of big image files and I found one user that was sending a program through email. Imagine sending the full Netscape install hqx to someone through mail.
Michael Davidson Any script in that folder should show up in the menu
Rusty Tucker Why not? I send very large files quite
Rusty Tucker often.
Brian Akey The servers sometimes time out during a big transfer.
Rusty Tucker There should not be any problems with large files, unless the mailers are broken.
Brian Akey It also depends on the internet connection speed.
Rusty Tucker That's true, its not convenient to get 20 Mb on 288 connection
Bill Gram-Reefer like the TF.sea
Brian Akey How many times have you tried to ftp a huge file and it died. Mail servers move mail in much the same way.
Donald McHose mailers = clients ?
Brian Akey yes
Donald McHose brb
Rusty Tucker The underlying technology is not much different than FTP or
Rusty Tucker HTTP
Rusty Tucker The problem I run into is that someone requests the demo by email, then their server tosses it back at me because it is too large.
Kevin Shearon Did anyone see Bill Gates on Charlie Rose last night?
Rusty Tucker It always seems to make the round trip successfully
Rusty Tucker No, I missed that KS!
Michael Davidson Let's name the folder Applescript; any script in that folder in the TF/User folder should show up in TF/Users new Script menu; comes stock with a few scripts: About The Script Menu and Connect to Spider Island
Michael Davidson No KS, but I did see him on CNN.
Kevin Shearon Pretty funny, Gates uses words like neat
Michael Davidson Poor Gates....getting questions from Senators that haven't a clue
Rusty Tucker yeah, right!
Bill Gram-Reefer everyone hates a monopoly unless they got one
Kevin Shearon they were talking about how Gates has to figure out who he will donate his money to. He doesn't believe a lot of it should be left to his kids
Michael Davidson poor kids
Bill Gram-Reefer he hasn't replicated yet
Kevin Shearon he's firing blanks
Brian Akey a daughter.
Rusty Tucker I thought he had one, and another planned?
Bill Gram-Reefer planned? like WIndows 98?
Michael Davidson VaporChild
Brian Akey So did he look bad or what?
Kevin Shearon they were talking about palm held computers, computers for the car that work with voice recognition, and 1 billion computers in service in a couple of years and all the operating software they will need to run them
Rusty Tucker Brian, you offered a a few topics for discussion....
Kevin Shearon no he looked quite relaxed, but he crouched when he sat, his mother must not have told him to sit up straight
Michael Davidson On CNN, the Senators looked Bad....and Gates didn't know how to answer their questions because the questions mostly just showed that the Senators didn't know what they were asking really
Brian Akey LDAP?
Brian Akey I have a demo on NT that does it and it works well.
Brian Akey Seems like the user manager has all the stuff and LDAP source is free
Brian Akey How many people use TFS with pop clients?
Bill Gram-Reefer i do
Rusty Tucker Someone could probably take that source and get the info from UM via Apple Events.
Rusty Tucker I do
Rusty Tucker Just about everyone here does I think
Brian Akey How hard would it be to support IMAP?
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Jim Leary!
Rusty Tucker IMAP is quite a bit more complex than POP3
Brian Akey The current tfclient works like IMAP should.
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker ... its also not clear that IMAP will be that widely
Rusty Tucker embraced.
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Bob Nunn!
Michael Davidson I'm not sure that IMAP is so hot, esp. given the stress on the servers that would come from it.
Brian Akey Exchange, Netscape, Eudora, Pegasus 3.
Rusty Tucker From a TeleFinder viewpoint, it probably makes more sense to beef up TF's own email capabilities instead of adding IMAP support
Michael Davidson What is it that you are thinking by "Adding scripting rules to the mail server."
Brian Akey IMAP is still new but it is being supported.
Michael Davidson I totally agree with that RT!
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat mikael fredriksson!
Brian Akey What about LDAP?
Bill Gram-Reefer so would potential plug-ins for FM Pro be cross-platform capable for Ma nd W versions of FM?
mikael fredriksson hi!
Bill Gram-Reefer hi mikael
Brian Akey I heard 1 Million windows users bought FMPro last year.
Rusty Tucker The idea of mail scripting is intriguing, what did you mean by that?
Brian Akey Have something like mail filtering and spml rolled into one.
Rusty Tucker Filtering I get, but SPML?
Brian Akey Have a message come in and fire off a modem to beep you or send an auto-reply.
Brian Akey SPML like for stuff like auto sigs on outgoing mail.
Bill Gram-Reefer why spml?
Rusty Tucker any kind of embedded macro capability I think he means
Brian Akey spml like
Brian Akey Yes
Bill Gram-Reefer ah
Michael Davidson I'm not sure if Mail Server should auto reply but bob Nunn was thinking it would be nice for User to have a way to auto-reply (like it does forwarding mail)
Rusty Tucker is really Gateway material.
Brian Akey Have the server look for key words to filter on like SPAM filters.
Donald McHose That may be dangerous to accept and run a macro in auto.
Brian Akey auto?
Michael Davidson But still, having MS scriptable might be interesting, and make it easier for special "gateways"
Rusty Tucker That type of email automation can be done today by creating a specialized mail client and having it listen to a specific mail box.
Brian Akey How?
Rusty Tucker Much like Macjordomo works
Rusty Tucker just a sec
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat mikael fredriksson!
Donald McHose what is the latest word on the new TF server stability?Any problems to date?
Brian Akey Rusty have you had any time to look into the sort order coming up wrong on TFS when it points to an NT volume?
Michael Davidson I can see Rusty's idea; An applescript app could watch a mail folder named "Info@bbs.com" and examine the content of the mail, and respond with an email reply.
Bob Nunn I am pleased so far with the latest BETA's. Since I installed the mail server last night I have been up.
mikael fredriksson No bombs since I removed HDS plugin (RT know more about the bug I found)
Donald McHose Thanks Bob.Is the bug directly related to the HDS plug-in or any plug-ins?
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Jim DeHaven!
Brian Akey After playing with the extensions my server is running well.
mikael fredriksson its a bug in HDS
Rusty Tucker ba- NT doesn't keep the files in sorted order, hence they come up
Rusty Tucker randomly
Jim DeHaven hi rusty
Donald McHose Gots to get kids.C-ya Tues.
Rusty Tucker My bot it cutting off the last word very so often
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Brian Akey Any way to fix it?
Bob Nunn It would take care of the vacation mail scenario. I like to think I could set up and automatically send a remove message in response to SPAM. Kind of an automated spam responder.
Brian Akey Does it happen on AppleShare servers?
Rusty Tucker NO, BA
Michael Davidson But remove mail to spammers just confirms to them that they have a valid address and they all ask you to reply to remove in different ways Bob
Rusty Tucker Apple share keeps it files on Mac volumes which are in sorted order
Rusty Tucker Better to use Mail Servers spam filter, it tells the spammer that the address does not exist
Jim DeHaven I have just installed system 8 and upgraded my CSI init--it still had to be loaded first in order to not crash the machine--anyone had experience with this?
Michael Davidson Yes RT about spam filter, but Bob's auto.reply idea for individual users (like forwarding mail) is still a good idea
Rusty Tucker Yep , we discussed the auto-reply biz not too long
Michael Davidson Where can you find CSI now JD, they left AOL and I cannot find them
Jim DeHaven At the address in the CSI serial download--in the comments--on www
Rusty Tucker Auto-reply needs filtering as well. Otherwise it replies indiscriminately, like back to mailing
Michael Davidson I always load CSI very early (but am not using OS 8)
Jim DeHaven I forgot the address or I would give it to you
Rusty Tucker Back to Special Mail clients
Michael Davidson That's true RT about auto reply needing filtering (an Applescript might do it)
Jim DeHaven http://www.creative-solutions-inc.com/
Rusty Tucker Macjordomo works this way, using one address to accept commands ( sub,
Rusty Tucker unsub, and another for posting ( like
Rusty Tucker tf-announce
Michael Davidson Yes, I think an auto reply for the sysop would be very doable (could be a listserv like), and that would be nice; this doesn't address USER auto replies though
Michael Davidson For that, you would need mail to go thru a filter before auto-replying...how can that be achieved on the server (the user could currently do it from his machine)
Rusty Tucker It's probably best handled on the client side.
Michael Davidson Thanks Jim!
Bill Gram-Reefer uh-oh, postal carrier meets dog...got to run
Michael Davidson Maybe you're right there Rusty
Brian Akey With a web interface the user could do it at the server. Mail filter rules at the server.
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Michael Davidson I think the "listserv" idea might be a good idea; maybe I'll look into that.
Rusty Tucker Any last Q's before we wrap up for this week?
Jim DeHaven yes
Jim DeHaven this is basic
Michael Davidson Yes, Rusty, did you have a chance to look at the trimming problem?
Jim DeHaven in the set up boxes for the internet gateway
Rusty Tucker You haven't been reading the announcements topic I see
Jim DeHaven what does the domains box do?
Rusty Tucker If you need to route specific domains to a gateway, you enter them there.
Michael Davidson If you mean me RT, you are correct.
Rusty Tucker If you already have "default" turned on, its not necessary to enter anything
Jim DeHaven I ask this because i (finally) succeeded in getting my home BBS to act as a gateway for my school BBS
Jim DeHaven right--in fact it is harmful to enter something
Rusty Tucker MD - the trimming problem(s) in mail server are fixed now.
Jim DeHaven it causes mail to be rejected for too many hops
Rusty Tucker JD only if it sets up
Jim DeHaven if what sets up rusty?
Rusty Tucker ie if you put a domain name that should be routed somewhere else, like your local BBS domain name
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Jim DeHaven exactly--that's what I did
Jim DeHaven i put koolnet.org there and dl.koolnet.org in one of the spiderisland gateways
Jim DeHaven the dl.koolnet.org mail was delivered
Jim DeHaven the koolnet.org mail was bounced
Jim DeHaven until i removed koolnet.org from the domains box and left the box blank
Jim DeHaven it works fine now--one other question--about macsbug
Rusty Tucker that will cause all your own domain's mail to be returned back to you ISP's
Rusty Tucker ok
Rusty Tucker my favorite program
Jim DeHaven I installed it in the system folder--but it doesn't pop up when an application crashes
Jim DeHaven is it supposed to?
Jim DeHaven or does it only do so when the machine freezes
Rusty Tucker yes, once you restart
Jim DeHaven so if I restart after a type 1 error I will see macsbug?
Rusty Tucker if the machine freezes, that may not bring up macsbugs, it depends on some things
Jim DeHaven even if the machine is doing fine
Rusty Tucker If you get a type 1 error macsbugs should come sup
Jim DeHaven after a restart?
Rusty Tucker w/ 8.0 you need a newer macsbugs
Jim DeHaven I have the new one
Jim DeHaven I just wanted to make sure I was looking for the right stuff
Jim DeHaven I still can't use version 5.6 of TeleFinder and want to get that issue put away
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Nick Young!
Rusty Tucker when macsbugs is installed, you should drop into macsbugs right when it crashes
Jim DeHaven this does not happen
Rusty Tucker verify that its installed by pressing "command-powerkey"
Rusty Tucker it should then drop into macsbugs
Jim DeHaven OK
Rusty Tucker then you can get back by typing g followed by return
Jim DeHaven is there anything to installing it other than dropping it into the system folder?
Rusty Tucker no, that's all you need to do
Jim DeHaven I will check that out the--thanks
Rusty Tucker what version of macsbugs is it?
Jim DeHaven I think 6.5.4a3
Bob Nunn you do have to restart before it becomes active.
Jim DeHaven it's the one on the apple website
Jim DeHaven that they say you must have to avoid the error on startup you get with earlier versions
Rusty Tucker same as i have, make sure its in the root of the system folder, not the extension folder
Jim DeHaven I may have screwed up simply because I was hurrying to keep the BBS offline as short a time as possible
Rusty Tucker also, the "welcome to mac" start up screen should tell you its installed
Jim DeHaven OK--something else I can check--thanks
Rusty Tucker Any other Q's?
Bob Nunn I need the log today. Thanks
Rusty Tucker already in HTML too!
Brian Akey Bye.
Bob Nunn Cool.
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker OK , then I guess that's it for this week. We'll be back online next Tues, 11
March 6, 1998
-- ©Copyright 1998, Spider Island Software