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PCElm 3.01 - Installation and User Manual 0) Files 1) About PCElm and where and how to get it 2) History and Version Numbers 3) Installation 3.1 Configuration File 3.2 Environment Variables 3.3 Other Files 3.4 Starting PCElm 4) Using PCElm 5) Troubleshooting 6) Notes for interfacing with UUCP 7) Languages 8) Credits 9) The Future 0) Files This package contains the following files: Name Description ---------------------------------------------------------------- !README A plea to read the manual _before_ using PCElm ALIAS Example alias file MARVIN SIG Example signature file PCELM RC PCElm configuration file PCELM DEU PCElm message file, german language PCELM ENG PCElm message file, english language PCELM MAN PCElm installation and user manual PCELM EXE PCElm executable 1) About PCElm and where and how to get it PCElm is a mail user agent (UA) with a user interface closely modeled after the USENET ELM. To avoid confusion, we would like to mention that PCElm and USENET ELM are *not* related. PCElm is intended to be used as a drop-in replacement for BM when using the KA9Q NOS package or as a replacement for mail.exe when using UUPC. It can also be used for other mailsystems, as all relevant things for compatibility with MTA's (Message Transfer Agents) are configurable. Hilights: PCElm has a nice user interface, with easy to learn and easy to use commands. UN*X users will already be familiar with the more important commands. It can be made to work with just about every mail system there is for PC's, as PCElm makes no assumptions at all about the underlying network software. Finally, PCElm is multilingual; you can make all messages appear in your favorite language. Message files for English and German currently exist. PCElm in hamradio mode creates text- and workfiles directly usable by NET or NOS for distribution with SMTP. In UUCP mode, PCElm execs a uucp mailer (usually rmail.exe) to feed mail to your uucp program. Since there are many uucp programs for PCs out there, it is up to you to find the right way to exec the mailer (See the discussion on the uucpcall parameter below). As our knowledge of UUPC, WAFFLE etc. is limited, we can't help there. PCElm is Copyright (C) 1988,89,90,91,92 by Wolfgang Siebeck and Martin Freiss. The executable pcelm.exe may be freely copied and distributed, provided that all files in this package are distributed with it and provided that the copyright notices are retained. No money may be charged for copying PCElm. A license is given to use PCElm for an unlimited time in non-commercial environments. No warranty, expressed or implied, is given that PCElm does what you think it does. The usual disclaimers apply: It works for us. Should you want or need support in setting up PCElm beyond the scope of this manual, want us to include special features in PCElm, want to include PCElm with your product or otherwise use PCElm in a commercial environment (i.e. make money out of people using PCElm), contact us. If you need support from us, we would request that you register PCElm with us for a fee of 10$ or the equivalent amount in your favorite currency (20 DM or 6 british pounds at current rates). No checks or MO's please; exchange fees for foreign currency checks are more than 10$ over here. Cash in an airmail letter is preferred. A (rather nice) printed manual is available from Wolfgang Siebeck to registered users for an additional fee of $7. Registered users will get advance notice of bug fixes and new releases if we know their email address. If you don't need support, we wouldn't complain about a donation either :-) If you would like the source code (C, with Turbo C 2.0((C) Borland) or later versions, Borland C++ recommended), the fee is 30$. The rationale behind this is that support costs us both time and money (as you might know, Germany has the highest postal and telephone charges in the world). 2 Emails of 5 KB length to overseas already eat up the 10$. We can be reached at Wolfgang Siebeck -or- Martin Freiss Rosstr. 38-40 Muehlenfloessstr. 60 D-W 5100 Aachen D-W 4792 Bad Lippspringe Germany Germany Email: siebeck@infoac.rmi.de freiss.pad@sni.de Email is preferred. Bug reports are welcome if they are complete, i.e. please specify all configuration parameters, your hardware, version of NOS or uucp software, and send an excerpt of the mailbox you are having trouble with if necessary. We can't fix bugs we can't reproduce. Suggestions for enhancements to PCElm are of course also welcome. 2) History and Version Numbers PCElm was originally based on BM, Bdales Mailer, by Barksdale Garbee II, N3EUA, version 3.0, reworked by Gerard van der Grinten, PA0GRI, Phil Karn, KA9Q, and Dave Trulli, NN2Z. BM at that time was a UNIX mail lookalike with a restricted set of commands. Someday in early 1988, Martin added a reply-include-old-message command to BM, and later that year, with the advent of Turbo C 1.5, Wolfgang Siebeck devised the user interface modeled after Dave Taylor's ELM. Creeping featurism then set in, and more and more capabilities were added, until all resemblances to BM ceased to exist. This mailer was then renamed to PCElm. The version number went to 1.9 in middle 1989 and stopped there. We had no real use for PCElm any more then, as we both had bigger computers than PCs to play around with at that time :-). PCElm at this time had never been officially distributed, we just gave some copies to friends in Germany and the Netherlands. Imagine our surprise, when, in 1990, mail began to trickle in from PCElm users in Britain and the US and it developed that there was a large user community. In late 1990 Kelvin Hill, G1EMM, took over development of PCElm, as we did not have time to develop PCElm further. Sadly, Kelvin dropped development in early 1991 due to work pressure. At that time, he had developed versions 2.0 to 2.2 and distributed them. Unluckily enough, we don't know what's in these versions. Rumour has it that Kelvin intended to incorporate a news reader for use with KA9Q NOS's NNTP capabilities, but to our knowledge this did not happen. PCElm 3.0 was then written in August 1991, again by Wolfgang Siebeck and Martin Freiss. PCElm 3.0 is the 'official' son of PCElm 1.9a. We hope that this will end the version number confusion regarding PCElm. 3) Installation First, set the environment variable HOME to point to the directory where PCElm's configuration file and alias file reside. This environment variable is mandatory! PCElm will not start up without it (see also 3.2, environment variables). Example: set HOME=d:\usr\marvin 'CD' to your home directory, if you are not already there. Then, select the language you want to use by copying or renaming the appropriate message file to 'pcelm.msg'. The message files 'pcelm.eng' (English) and 'pcelm.deu' (German) are included in this distribution. Example: cd \usr\marvin copy pcelm.eng pcelm.msg For this manual, we assume that you are using the English language. If you want to use another language, read chapter 7 first, which discusses setups for foreign languages in more detail. 3.1 Configuration File ---------------------- PCElm needs to know a lot of things about your MTA and your computer to function properly. You need to configure PCElm's configuration file, pcelm.rc, before starting PCElm for the first time. DO NOT USE THE EXAMPLE pcelm.rc DISTRIBUTED IN THIS PACKAGE AS-IS. Edit it first with an ASCII-Editor of your choice. pcelm.rc is a pure ASCII-file. Lines that start with a hash '#' or empty lines are regarded as comments. Other lines are of the form <keyword><blank><information>. The keywords that PCElm knows about are explained in detail below. Note that ASCII space is used as a delimiter; if you need to include a space in the information field, you can put double quotes '"' around it. If (for whatever reason) you need to insert control characters into a line, write them as escaped decimals (i.e. \001 would be Ctrl-A). Some more escapes PCElm knows about are \n, newline, \r, carriage return, \\ backslash, and \t, tab. Note that PCElm likes slashes in pathnames, not backslashes, i.e. you must write a path like "c:\spool\mail" as "c:/spool/mail". Example: SOH-UUCP "From " Keywords are case insensitive. Keyword is one of: HOST ---- This is the hostname to be used for the hamradio mode. It usually is your callsign followed by .ampr.org, as in "dg5kx.ampr.org" Example: host dg5kx.ampr.org UUCPHOST -------- This is the hostname to be used for uucp mode. Note: traditional uucp hostnames need to be unique, so know what you are doing here. This is usually either your hostname followed by .uucp as in "dg5kx.uucp" or a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) as in "dg5kx.rmi.de". Example: uucphost dg5kx.uucp USER ---- This is the name of your mailbox. It usually is your username (login) at this system. (Note that this puts an 8 character length restriction on your username, as MessDOS can't handle more characters). If this entry is commented out, the value of the environment variable 'mailbox' is used. Example: user marvin FULLNAME -------- Your real life name belongs here. This is so that other people can see who you really are, even if your username is 'gandalf' or 'blackadder'. (No disrespect meant if you are really called Gandalf). If this entry is commented out, the value of the environment variable 'name' is used. Example: fullname "Martin W Freiss" REPLY ----- Use this if you want replies to your messages to go to another machine or if you are on a network where headers are mangled so badly people can't reply to you otherwise. If you aren't sure, set it to your own email address. Example: reply freiss.pad@sni.de ZONE ---- The timezone you are living in. Should be 3 characters, not more, not less. There is an ISO standard for time zone names if memory serves me correctly, but the ISO number escapes me. Example: zone MET MAXLET ------ The maximum number of messages that may be in a mailbox at once. Decrease this number if you are short on memory. PCElm startup will slow down considerably if have a huge mailbox; on the other hand I doubt anybody can find his way around 300 messages in a single mailbox. Example: maxlet 300 EDIT ---- The filename of your favorite editor goes here, This should be a small editor capable of producing true ASCII files (if possible with no Control-Z at the end, though PCElm tries to zap Ctrl-Z's if it sees them). What I'm trying to convey here is that Word for Windows ((C) Microsoft) is not the sort of thing you want to put here. If this entry is commented out, the value of the environment variable 'editor' is used. If you don't have an editor handy (edlin doesn't count :-)), try builtin+ as editor. This is a small full screen editor that is hardcoded into PCElm. Nothing fancy, and it still has some raw edges, but it works. See end of chapter 4 for a brief discussion of the commands the editor understands. Example: edit dte SMTP ---- This is where you put the directory where your mailboxes reside. All mailboxes, i.e. both the hamradio and uucp mailboxes should be in one directory. If this entry is commented out, the value of the environment variable 'maildir' is used. (Don't worry about the curious name SMTP. It's called that way for historical reasons and compatibility with BM). Example: smtp c:/spool/mail QUEUEDIR -------- This is where you put the directory where outgoing mail gets queued up. Typically, this is called /spool/mqueue or something like that. This is for hamradio mode only; in UUCP mode, the exterior mailer determines where it queues mail. Example: queuedir c:/spool/mqueue VIDEO ----- Put a 1 here if you want direct writes into video ram, which is fast but tends to confuse CGAs and not-so-very-compatible PCs. A 0 will do all video updates through the BIOS, which is painfully slow. Example: video 1 SOH-UUCP -------- This is a sequence of words that tell PCElm that a new message begins. Uh.. message delimiter is the word I was looking for. Usually "From ", but may be anything at all if you are using weird mailers. If you have MMDF-style mailboxes (like in UUPC/extended), use the special keyword mmdf; otherwise, "From " (note the blank) or "Received " usually work. Example: SOH-UUCP "From " ( or, if you are using UUPC/extended, SOH-UUCP mmdf ) SOH-HAM ------- See above, but for ham radio. Example: SOH-ham "From " HAM-EXT ------- Extension for amateur radio The file extension your mailbox file has goes here. A mailbox is constructed from your username with the extension defined here appended to it. Note that even if your mailbox has no extension, you still need to define the dot "." as extension ! The dot is mandatory. Example: ham-ext ".txt" UUCP-EXT -------- Extension for UUCP See above, but for uucp. UUPC usually has no extension, so we just define the dot as extension. Example: uucp-ext "." START ----- Startmode for PCElm. If Startmode is "uucp", PCElm will start in uucp mode; anything else will cause PCElm to start in hamradio mode. Example: START hamradio COLORS ------ Define various colours for display: The numbers below are hexadecimal numbers defining a foreground and background colour for various scenarios. The routine determining the colours is quite simpleminded, so please don't use spaces here. If you are confused as to what to enter here, either leave it alone or consult an IBM PC programming manual as to how these numbers are arrived at. The color codes are as follows: Background | Foreground --------------------------------- 0 0 0 1 | 1 1 1 1 ---> 0x1f ---> Bright white on blue --------------------------------- B R G B | I R G B L E R L | N E R L I D E U | T D E U N E E | E E E K N | N N This will definitely get more comfortable to configure in a later version of PCElm. Values are: normal screen, bold, more prompt, default at exit, selection bar. Example: COLORS 1f,4f,2f,07,6f UUCPCALL -------- Format of uucp command Supported macros are: $ filename containing message header and body % name of recipient & subject of message (you shouldn't need this) PCElm constructs the workfiles and messagefiles that KA9Q NET and NOS needs by itself, but execs an exterior mailer in uucp mode so that headers peculiar to your particular implementation of uucp (or whatever) can be written. The exterior mailer is usually called rmail.exe or mail.exe. The macros $, & and % are expanded _once_, they may not occur multiple times in this line. For my version of UUPC (quite old), the following line works. Example: uucpcall "rmail % < $" or, try uucpcall "rmail -f $ %" for UUPC/extended newer versions. This works with UUPC/extended 1.11k and foregoes the need for a temporary file (should be a little bit faster). SEQUENCE -------- Name of sequence file. This is the file where the numbers for message id's are stored. It is located in the mail spool directory. Example: sequence sequence.seq PRINT ----- Name of print device. Put the device name of your line printer here, e.g. LPT1, LPT2 or LPT3. If you want to connect a serial printer, use 'mode' (the DOS command) to tie a serial port to a LPT device. Example: print lpt1 WEEDOUT ------- Headerlines to hide. A weedout list is a list of headerlines that you don't want to see when mail is displayed. It is annoying to get mail with 2 lines of text and 60 lines of header; using weedout you can shrink the displayed headers to just a few lines or nothing at all. Put the beginning of the headerline(s) after the weedout directive, and remember you need to quote the weedout list if there are spaces in it! Example: weedout "Reply-To: Message-Id: From: To: Subject: Received: From\32" With this example, you just get to see the Date: line, Status: line and X- headerlines if present. 3.2 Environment Variables ------------------------- The environment variable HOME is mandatory. It must be set to the directory where the configuration file pcelm.rc resides. The alias file for mail aliases is also expected in the HOME directory. At the DOS prompt, type "set home=<your_home_directory>" or include that line in your autoexec.bat. Example: set home=d:\usr\marvin As you may have noticed in 3.1, PCElm can also take some configuration parameters from environment variables. This is for backwards compatibility with older versions of PCElm. If a configuration parameter is specified both in an environment variable and in pcelm.rc, pcelm.rc wins. 3.3 Other Files --------------- PCElm currently knows about three other files: ALIAS ----- You can define aliases for often-used mail addresses, so that you need not type the complete email address all the time. This is especially convenient for mailings to a group of recipients. The alias file is called 'alias' and resides in your HOME directory. Lines in the alias file beginning with a hash '#' are taken to be comments. All other lines have the format <alias> <1st recipient> <2nd recipient> ... Example: # This is my alias file hikaru dg2kk@dg2kk.ampr.org marvin marvin@dg5kx.ampr.org martin freiss.pad@sni.de andrew andrew@omega.uucp # broadcast dg2kk@dg2kk.ampr.org siebeck@infoac.rmi.de rmohr@infoac.rmi.de Note that aliases may not extend over more than one line. Maximum line length is 127 characters. Aliases are not resolved recursively, i.e. the recipient may not be yet another alias. SIGNATURE --------- A signature is automatically appended to your mails, if a signature file is present. The signature file must be in your HOME directory and has the name <username>.sig; i.e. if your username (see USER in pcelm.rc) is marvin, the signature file is called marvin.sig . There is no length restriction on signatures; however signatures longer than 4 lines are generally frowned upon. The signature, if present, should contain your name and email address. PCELM.MSG --------- This is the message file. If you are installing a language other than English, be sure to read chapter 7. As detailed at the beginning of chapter 3, copy one of the supplied message files pcelm.eng or pcelm.deu to pcelm.msg. The message file must be in the HOME directory. Note that this makes it possible for each user to use PCElm in his native language. 3.4 Starting PCElm ------------------ Now you are ready to start PCElm. Run it on a copy of your mailbox first, so that you won't lose your mail if something goes wrong. Just type pcelm to start, no commandline arguments are necessary. 4) Using PCElm Though PCElm is written for interactive use, you can also use it to send mail from batch files or from the command line. Type pcelm <recipient> <subject> < filename or type filename | pcelm <recipient> <subject> to send mail from the command line, e.g. pcelm freiss.pad@sni.de "Hi there!" < mymail If you omit the subject, PCElm will generate a subject line of 'No subject specified'. Normally, you'll want to use PCElm interactively. The rest of this chapter explains the commands PCElm understands. When PCElm starts up, it displays a status line at the top. Below that, up to 10 messages are displayed in the index, giving from left to right the message state (Read or Unread, Tagged, Deleted), the message number, the sender of the mail, the date the mail was sent, the length of the mail in Bytes and the subject line of the mail. The subject line is truncated to fit on the screen. In the lower half of the screen, 4 lines list some of the more often used commands. You type commands by pressing the highlighted letter at the Command: prompt. Error messages (hopefully there aren't any) are displayed on the bottom line. * Note that the 'Q' and 'X' keys have exchanged their meanings * from previouses releases. A short overview of the commands available: Up Arrow, Down Arrow, Page Up, Page Down, Home, End These keys move the 'select'-bar one message up, down, one page (= 10 messages) up, one page down, to the first message, to the last message in your mailbox. Return Displays the message you have currently selected. More on display commands below. + Tag. Mark a mail for saving, deleting or forwarding. - Untag. Delete a previous tag. F1 Function Key F1 displays a help page which lists all commands and a short explanation of what they do. F2 Function Key F2 toggles the video display mode (VRAM or BIOS writes to update the screen). DEL Delete the selected mail or all tagged mails. INS Undelete the selected mail. a About PCElm. A page of text giving the version and the authors' names. Just an ego-fix for us :-) A Alias editing. Drops you into a small full-screen editor, where you can edit your alias file. If you did not have an alias file before, it is created for you. You can of course also use other editors to edit the alias file. c Change mailbox. This allows you to change your user id without leaving PCElm. For example, ham radio operators often have their first name as username and their call sign as another username. This is probably less useful in uucp. You will be prompted for a new fullname to match your new user id and you are prompted for a new hostname. C Colour. Toggles from the user selected colours to default colours to default monochrome display. d Delete the selected mail or all tagged mails. F Freshen the mailbox. Mails marked for deletion will be deleted, new mail that has arrived in the meantime is processed and your mailbox is displayed anew. f Forward the selected (or all tagged) mails to another user. You will be prompted for the recipient of the forwarded mail and for the subject line; the subject line defaults to the original subject with (fwd) appended to it. l List unsent mails. Shows what files there are in the mail queue directory and who sent them to whom. It also gives you a chance to kill them (last chance to zap a mail if you mistakenly sent it). This currently works only in hamradio mode (will work in uucp mode in the next version). m Send mail. You will be prompted for the recipient of the mail and the subject, after which you are dropped into the editor. More on editor commands below. You can specify multiple recipients delimited by blanks at the 'Mail to:' prompt. If you do, a Cc: (Carbon Copy) line will automatically be generated. n Next unread. Moves the select-bar to the next unread mail. p Paint. Redraw the screen if it got corrupted. P Print. Prints all tagged mails or the hilighted mail on a line printer. If 'print.com' of DOS is loaded, PCElm will queue the print job to 'print', so you can go on reading mail while your tagged mails are printed in the background. If 'print' is not loaded, PCElm will print the mails on the device specified in the configuration file (parameter 'print'). Q Quit. Quits from PCElm, saving all changes to your mailbox. r Reply to a mail. You are dropped into the editor to compose your reply; after you are finished, mail is sent to the originator of the mail with a subject line of "Re: <original subject>". R Reply to a mail. Same as above, but the original mail is included in your reply. This helps the recipient to understand what your reply is all about. s Save the selected mail (or all tagged mails) to a file. You will be prompted for a filename, in which the message complete with header will be saved. S change Start Of Header (SOH). This changes the 'magic word' PCElm looks for to determine the beginning of a mail. All sort of strange things may happen if you set a wrong SOH; be warned that you may destroy your mailbox if you fool around with this and then use a command that saves your mailbox to disk. 'S' is for experimenting and for use with mailboxes from foreign MTA's; for everyday use, you should set the SOH from the pcelm.rc file using the SOH-HAM and SOH-UUCP parameters. (The special keyword 'mmdf' causes the new SOH to be a line of Control-A's, as needed by MMDF and UUPC/extended). You must do a 'c'hange mailbox for the new SOH to take effect. t Transmit from file. You will be prompted for the recipient of the mail, the subject, and the filename to transmit. Note that usually MTAs can only send pure ASCII files, binary files have to be encoded first. T Toggle mailsystem. PCElm can handle 2 mailsystems, UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) and hamradio (for use with KA9Q NOS). When you want to switch mailsystems, hitting 'T' will prompt you for a new username, new fullname and a new hostname, since hostnames in the hamradio community (Example: dg5kx.ampr.org) and UUCP community (Example: atreju.rmi.de) sometimes differ. u Undelete the selected mail. w Write the selected mail (or all tagged mails) to a file. You will be prompted for a filename, in which the message will be saved without the header. X Exit. Exits from PCElm immediately, without updating your mailbox. When you are prompted for new values for (for example) your fullname, PCElm pops up a window to do this. You can then either hit return, thus accepting the default value displayed or enter a new value. When the new value begins with a dollar sign, it is taken to be an environment variable (e.g. if you have an environment variable MYNAME=beeblebrox, entering $MYNAME here causes beeblebrox to be taken as the new value). Editor Commands --------------- When writing mail, PCElm drops you into a very simplistic line editor of its own. This editor is useful for writing short notes, but for longer mails you should use another editor of your choice. This editor must be able to take the name of a file to edit as its one and only commandline argument (something like "edit mail.txt" must work), and it must be able to create pure ASCII files. If at all possible, use an editor that does not terminate files with Control-Z. Commands understood by the line editor: Commands begin with a dot '.' in the first column of a line. A dot elsewhere in the text has no special meaning. .? Help. Shows available commands. .e Start the editor defined in pcelm.rc. .p Print the message you have typed so far. .q Quit. Aborts the mail. .r file Reads the file "file" into the message buffer. If "file" contains wildcards (i.e. '*' or '?'), you will be shown a list of files matching your command. .m num Inserts the mail number "num" into the message buffer. .. Put a dot in the first column of a line. . End message. PCElm also sports a builtin full screen editor, which is selected if either no editor was defined in pcelm.rc and the environment variable EDITOR is not set or if you selected 'builtin+' as editor in pcelm.rc. This editor is included as 'editor of last resort'. It is definitely not perfect yet, but we liked it so much we included it. Commands understood by the fullscreen editor: Arrow keys, Pg Up, Pg Dn, Home, End those work as you would expect and move you around in the text. Alt-D delete line Alt-F find a string Alt-L set left margin Alt-N insert line. Alt-Q quit, saving text. Alt-R set right margin Alt-T set tab size. Alt-W toggle word wrapping. Alt-X quit _without_ saving text. Bsp (backspace) delete character left from cursor. Del delete character under cursor. F1 help screen Quirks: Maximum linelength is 160 characters. The bottom line on the screen is sometimes duplicated if you are scrolling; this affects only the screen though, the text is ok. If you are using the builtin full screen editor and are annoyed at its lack of functionality or bugs, tough :-). The simple fix is to use another editor. Display Commands ---------------- When reading a mail, PCElm normally displays the mail one page at a time. The following keys have special meanings: Return one line forward q quit to menu / Search. You are prompted for a string to search for. The searching routine remembers the last item you searched for, so you can just press Return on subsequent invocations of '/'. 5) Troubleshooting Some of the things that can (and will, Murphy being what he is) go wrong and proposed solutions: Problem: PCElm says 'New mail has arrived' and beeps, though there is no new mail. Solution: You probably edited your mailbox with an editor once, and now there is a Control-Z at the end of it. This means that the mailbox file is now one character longer than all the single mails added up, so PCElm concludes that a new mail must have arrived in the meantime. Using a proper editor, zap the Control-Z. Problem: PCElm stubbornly says 'No Mail!', although you have verified there _is_ mail. Solution: 1) The mail directory is configured wrong (check parameter SMTP in pcelm.rc) 2) Your username is not what you think it is (check NAME in pcelm.rc) 3) The extension for your mailbox file is incorrect (check HAM-EXT and UUCP-EXT in pcelm.rc) 4) The Start-Of-Header (SOH) is wrong, and PCElm therefore can't parse mail headers correctly (check SOH-HAM and SOH-UUCP). Problem: Mails have parts of their header missing or have parts of the header at the _end_ of the mailbody or generally look strange. Solution: The Start-Of-Header (SOH) is wrong, and PCElm therefore can't parse mail headers correctly (check SOH-HAM and SOH-UUCP). Problem: Reading mail is ok, but I can't send UUCP mail. Solution: 1) Check the uucpcall parameter in pcelm.rc. Verify that this commandline works by typing it in at the DOS prompt, expanding the ! and % macros by hand. For example, send a mail to yourself this way. If this doesn't work, check if the uucp mailer (mail.exe or rmail.exe) is in the path, and if the commandline is correct for your mailer (consult your uucp documentation for this). 2) There may not be enough memory left to execute the mailer under PCElm. Get rid of some TSR programs or decrease the MAXLET parameter in pcelm.rc and try again. Problem: When writing mail, my favorite editor does not start up when using the .e comand. Solution: The editor is either not in the path or there is not enough memory left to start the editor. Check the path and/or get rid of some TSR programs or decrease the MAXLET parameter in pcelm.rc and try again. Problem: When writing mail, the original mail is not included when using an exterior editor when using the 'R' command and/or everything typed in the editor is lost. Solution: PCElm needs an editor that can take a filename to edit as a commandline argument. Check if this works by typing "<your_editor> filename" at the DOS prompt. Check if your editor is a pure ASCII editor. If you use a text processing system, maybe it starts up in document mode and thus uses a non-ASCII document representation. 6) Notes for interfacing PCElm with UUCP programs Since this seems to be the most difficult thing to set up, some notes on how PCElm feeds mail to UUCP. PCElm is basically a User Agent. It needs another program to actually _do_ something with the mail generated by PCElm; in uucp mode, PCElm executes a uucp mailer to do the hard work. This mailer is usually called 'rmail.exe'; note the 'usually', your mailer might have a different name. PCElm requires that the mailer be in the path; that the mailer accepts as argument the uucp address of the recipient and that there is some way to get the mail into the mailer, either by specifying the file containing the mailbody on the command line or by feeding it to the mailer via input redirection. The mailer must be able to paste the header lines and the mailbody created by PCElm to the headers it generates itself _without_ mangling them and without inserting an empty line between its own header lines and the header supplied by PCElm. PCElm generates the From:, To:, Subject: and Message-Id: lines itself and feeds mail to the mailer in standard UUCP format. Why execute an exterior mailer at all? The rationale behind this is that (due to the many different types and versions of uucp software out there) it is nigh impossible to use all the features of the MTA directly from PCElm. Only your uucp mailer knows if you can do path aliasing and what headers are necessary for your particular network. On the other hand, we still want to have at least the mandatory header lines even if the mailer is real stupid and can't generate them itself. Reading mail: It seems that new versions of UUPC use MMDF style mailboxes, i.e. mails are separated by Control-A's. Whether or not this is a cool thing to do is a matter of opinion. Anyway, PCElm can handle this; use the special keyword mmdf in the SOH-UUCP parameter line in pcelm.rc to switch PCElm into MMDF mode. (i.e., the line in pcelm.rc should read SOH-UUCP mmdf ). 7) Languages PCElm can be configured to speak other languages than English. This is possible because all messages displayed on the screen are contained in a seperate message file, 'pcelm.msg'. Currently, message files in English ('pcelm.eng') and German ('pcelm.deu') exist - if you create your own message file in another language, be sure to send it to us, so that we can include it (with proper credit) in the next distribution. The appropriate message file must be copied (or renamed) to 'pcelm.msg' before using PCElm. The message file has the following format: Empty lines and lines starting with a hash '#' are ignored. Other lines have the form <number>:<text>, for example 150:"This is a line" Never change the message number - PCElm uses this number to be able to display the right message at the right time. You can change the text in quotes to your liking, but be warned that PCElm displays all and every message just as it appears in the message file. If you do something wrong, you will end up with a fancy-looking display. Keep a copy of the original message file for safety's sake. You can use escaped decimals in the message file (e.g. \\32 is ' ') as described in chapter 3.1. You can also change the keys that are used as command keys in the main menu - message 83 holds all keys (except function keys) that work. This is a good thing if you want to keep the commands intuitive; 'c' for 'change mailbox' is good to remember in English, but (for example) a German user would want 'W' for 'Wechsele Postfach' as a hotkey. If you create a message file in a new language, we would like to have it and to include it (with proper credit given) in a future release of PCElm. This manual is for the English version of PCElm. Foreign language versions use different hotkeys for most of the commands. At the time of this writing, this manual exists only in English, but you should be able to figure out which keys do what from the help screen (press F1 to see the help screen, regardless of what language you have configured). Initial setup is the same for all versions of PCElm however. 8) Credits We would like to thank Dave Taylor for programming the original ELM and for the idea for the user interface used both in ELM and PCElm. Thanks to Syd Weinstein, coordinator of the USENET ELM, for his good work. Thanks to Barksdale Garbee II, N3EUA, Gerard van der Grinten, PA0GRI, Phil Karn, KA9Q, and Dave Trulli, NN2Z, for creating BM. Thanks to Andrew Hardie, ash@omega.uucp, who suffered through the early beta versions and wins grand prize in bug-finding :-). We would also like to point out that PCElm is (apart from the idea for the user interface) not in any way derived from or connected with ELM. If you are using USENET news, the group comp.mail.elm is NOT the place to ask questions about PCElm. 9) The Future Just some things that _might_ be incorporated in PCElm in a future release and some that won't be: - News reading. PCElm already can be used with notes, as notes uses a mailbox-like structure to store news articles. A news mode for PCElm could be implemented, and it would be nice for use with NNTP in NOS. A lot of work though. (If you are not familiar with notes, notes is a news system that predates bnews and cnews and is now practically extinct. News uses another (more efficient) way of storing articles and thus has another interface to the user agent than notes). - a Windows 3.0 aware PCElm. Ask Wolfgang Siebeck (siebeck@infoac.rmi.de) for details. A beta version exists. - a version of PCElm for OS/2. PCElm _might_ run under OS/2 in the DOS window; I have no way of finding out.