EchoNotify is a freeware utility for TeleFinder/Tabby sysops that will notify users of incoming echomail. It needs to run as part of your Tabby events, and scans the Generic Import file for incoming mail that is directed at your users. If incoming echomail is found, a text file called "EchoMail Waiting!" will be placed in the user's mailbox with information about the incoming message. It is up to the users to delete this file after they are done with it. Otherwise new incoming mail notifications will keep getting appended onto the end of the file, kinda like the ubiquitous "Files Received Log" that you sometimes find.
Background:
One of the shortcomings of TeleFinder's messaging system is that it doesn't notify users when messages in public conferences are addressed to them. This is not usually a problem with local conferences, since their contents don't normally turn over rapidly. However, with FIDONet echomail, this is a bigger problem, since certain conferences have such high traffic that responses to users' queries may be trimmed out of the threads before the users even realize they had a reply waiting.
As an impatient S.O.B., I don't want to wait for version 4.0 of TeleFinder before this shortcoming is addressed (hint, hint). So I threw this little utility together to provide an interim solution.
Installation:
1) Copy the EchoNotify application to the BBS folder (the one with all your Tabby applications). Launch EchoNotify and select "Options" from the File menu. Type in the complete path to the EMail folder that the UserManager uses. This path needs to end in a colon ":". The text should exactly match the default mail path that shows up in the User Manager's "New User Settings" dialog. If you want, copy and paste it to get it right.
2) Add EchoNotify to ALL of your Tabby event strings, including the STR# resources in TabbyNet and Tabby Robot. EchoNotify needs to be placed directly BEFORE Import (or TFImport if you are using TFLink).
Limitations:
1) Requires System 7. TeleFinder 3.x also requires System 7, so this shouldn't be a problem.
2) This is supposed to be a stopgap solution, and as such, I didn't want to hassle with elegant things like AppleEvents, so unlike a good TF utility, EchoNotify doesn't ask the UserManager for the paths to the users' mailboxes. For EchoNotify to find a user's mailbox, it needs to match the user's name exactly and the user's mailbox needs to be in the default mail folder.
3) I don't know how MacKennel, Formula 1, or Aeolus work, so I'm not sure if EchoNotify will work properly with them. EchoNotify assumes that the "Generic" file will be in the same folder as EchoNotify, and that it contains the path to the generic folder, inside of which will be a "Generic Import" file. EchoNotify also assumes that there will be a folder called "Tabby" inside the folder with EchoNotify, and there will be a file in the Tabby folder called "areas.bbs". You can edit STR# 130 if you need to change this. Most filenames and paths that EchoNotify uses are in STR# resources, rather than being hardwired, so you can hack at it with ResEdit if you need to in order to make it work.
4) If one of your users has a name that matches another user on another bbs that has a message waiting, the user on your bbs will be notified. Sorry about that, but I'm sure all the John Smith's out there in netland are used to that by now.
5) Since the areas.bbs file is used to get the area names for notification, they may not match the names you have on your BBS. This might be annoying if you have USENET newsgroups gated into FIDONet or by using EMailGate to interface uucp to Tabby.
