The Datafile PD-CD 5/DATAFILE_PDCD5.iso/utilities/m/mailcheck/!MailCheck/!Help

Text File | 1997-04-14 | 10.8 KB | 252 lines

                            MailCheck v1.02
                            ———————————————

                            By Reuben Thomas


MailCheck checks whether a user on a remote system has unread email and
displays the result in an iconbar icon, which is updated periodically. It can
start a login automatically if a user has mail. Multiple users are handled.
MailCheck can also finger remote machines, displaying the results in the
current text editor.


Copyright and Disclaimer
————————————————————————

MailCheck is distributed as Freeware, and comes with no warranty. It is ©
R. R. Thomas 1996, and may not be sold, or distributed in altered form
without the author's permission.

The module "IServices" is © Justin Fletcher ([e-mail]), and
distributed with his permission. It may not be redistributed on its own (it
is freely distributable as a package complete with documentation, available
from Justin).

The module "MoreHelp" is © Sam Kington, at Merlhiot, 24420 Savignac les
Eglises, FRANCE (his email address seems to be out of date). You should
contact him for distribution conditions.

The modules "THHeapA" and "THHeapR" are © Tony Houghton ([e-mail]).
Distribution conditions and full instructions for programming with THHeap are
available from http://www.tcp.co.uk/~tonyh/.


Quick start
———————————

Look at the !Configure file, and at Scripts.Example. MailCheck supports
interactive help.


Is it for me?
—————————————

As is hopefully obvious, MailCheck is only any use if you have a machine
connected to the Internet, and if you receive email on a different machine.
If your mail is delivered to your computer (which will almost certainly be
the case if you have a domestic dial-up connection) then this program is Not
For You.


Installation
————————————

The modules in the root directory of the archive should be copied into
!System:

MoreHelp, THHeapA and THHeapR go in !System.Modules
IServices goes in !System.Modules.Network

If you're being picky, then you don't need both THHeap modules: you need
THHeapR if you have RISC OS 3.5 or later, and THHeapA otherwise.

You also need a resolver module, such as InetDB, ANT's Resolver, Gnome's
Resolve, or Stewart Brodie's DNSResolver. DNSResolver is highly recommended,
as it supports multitasking name resolution, so MailCheck will not freeze the
desktop if it takes a long time to find a particular host. It is available
from:

http://ftp.dsse.ecs.soton.ac.uk:8080/ftp/freenet/

under "Directory: s.brodie".

[Note to users of ANT's Resolver: this also supports multitasking DNS, but
ANT haven't released the specs (as of 13/2/97), so I can't use it and other
authors like Stewart can't emulate it.]


Configuration
—————————————

Before you use MailCheck, you must configure it by editing the !Configure
file inside the !MailCheck application. You must configure how often in
minutes it will check for mail (or 0 to disable automatic checks), how many
users there are, and give the users' details. Each user must have an entry of
the form:

                   name,id,host,cue,autologin,command

"name"      is the name that will appear on the icon bar, and must be no more
            than four characters so as to fit under the pillar box icon. I
            use initials.

"id"        is the user id of the account which will be checked for mail.

"host"      is the name of the machine on which the user's account is held.

"cue"       is a string which the output of "finger -l id@host" contains when
            the user has new mail. The cue must be less than 256 characters
            long and occur in the first 255 characters of a line.

            You what?
            —————————
            MailCheck works by fingering the current user and scanning the
            output for a particular text string. On most systems fingering a
            user will tell you if they have new mail; on my system a line
            starting "Most recent mail..." is added to finger's output, so my
            cue is "recent mail" (spaces are allowed).
               To discover what cue to use, make sure the user in question
            has mail (by sending them some, for instance), then use
            MailCheck's finger facility (in "Verbose" mode) on that user to
            see how their mail status is reported. Note that you must first
            fill in the cue with a dummy value, as otherwise MailCheck will
            refuse to run. See below for how to use finger in MailCheck.

"autologin" is a single character that determines whether MailCheck will
            automatically start a login when a user has mail. It may be:

               N - "N"ever start a login
               I - Start a login if mail was checked "I"nteractively, i.e.
                   by clicking on the MailCheck icon or by changing the
                   current user.
               A - "A"lways start a login. To avoid coming back to your
                   computer and finding the screen covered in logins,
                   MailCheck will only start a login when new mail first
                   arrives, unless the user made the check themselves.

"command"   is the command that will be run to start an automatic login. If
            it is left blank, an Open URL message (&4AF80) will be sent with
            the text "telnet://id@host". This is recognised for example by
            ANT's terminal program. Instead, you can write a script and give
            its name as the command. This allows you for example to write a
            FreeTerm script which can not only log you in but give your
            password and start your mail reader. The command will
            probably be of the form "MailCheck:Scripts.foo" where "foo" is a
            script you have placed in the directory !MailCheck.Scripts. An
            example script for use with FreeTerm is stored there. Scripts
            could also be used to generate automatic logins for other
            terminal programs such as Acorn's VT220 that don't recognise the
            Open URL message. I'd be happy to receive examples of scripts
            for use with such programs.

The !Configure file itself shows you how and where to put these bits of
information.

  A tip about scripts
  ———————————————————

You may be thinking "this logging in and running commands is all very well,
but I don't want to leave a file containing my password lying around on my
hard disk". My solution is a program which constructs such files when I turn
the computer on after asking me for my passwords, and which deletes them
again when I switch off, but there is another trick: simply omit the lines

wait "assword:"
sendl "xxxxxxx"

in the script. When the script runs it will enter your user id and then wait
for you to enter your password; after that the script will continue.


Usage
—————

  Checking for mail
  —————————————————

The MailCheck icon is a (usually red) pillar box (that's English for
mailbox) with the current user's name underneath. When the user has new mail
it will bulge; if the check for mail cannot be made for some reason it will
be greyed out.

When MailCheck is run it immediately checks for mail for the default user,
which is the first listed in the !Configure file. [Note: this check is made
even if automatic checking is disabled, as I assume that most people check
their mail first thing.] You can change the current user from the User menu;
changing the user also causes an immediate check. You can cause an immediate
check for the current user by clicking Select on the icon; clicking Adjust is
a short cut for selecting the "Current user" menu.

While MailCheck is checking, which may take several seconds, the icon has a
question mark over it. If the check cannot be made, an error message to that
effect is displayed. These signals are suppressed during the automatic
periodic checks; this makes MailCheck less obtrusive, and prevents it locking
up the desktop, which can be irritating if you are not at the computer when
it does so.

  Fingering
  —————————

Select "Finger..." from the main menu to bring up the Finger dialogue box.
You can enter a user to finger in the form "id@host" or use "@host" to list
all the users currently logged on to a host. The Verbose option chooses
whether full information will be displayed or just a summary (the latter is
recommended when using the "@host" form). You can finger configured users of
MailCheck by selecting them from the popup menu next to the Name box.

  Running MailCheck automatically
  ———————————————————————————————

You can run MailCheck in your boot sequence, provided it is run after your
Internet stack is loaded. On RISC OS 3 and later you can achieve this by
saving a Desktop boot file while MailCheck is running, or on RISC OS 3.5 and
later, you can copy the !MailCheck application into !Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks.
One thing to beware of is that if you also have FreeTerm in your boot
sequence it must run before MailCheck tries to start a FreeTerm login.


Acknowledgements
————————————————

Justin Fletcher ([e-mail]) for SocketLib and InetServices. This is
to my knowledge the only BASIC library for sockets programming, and it was
easy to use. SocketLib is part of JFShared, but you don't need that as I've
made SocketLib into a BLib linkable library; Justin Fletcher has kindly
allowed me to give it to anyone who wants it, so just ask.

Ian Palmer ([e-mail]) and Tom Hughes ([e-mail])
for BLibII rel. IV, Sam Kington for MoreHelp, Tony Houghton ([e-mail])
for THHeap, Dick Alstein ([e-mail]) for TemplEd, Ragnar Hafstað
([e-mail]) for BasCrunch, Tony Howat ([e-mail]) and Merlin
Hughes for FreeTerm, and Dominic Symes and the mode authors for Zap (still
going strong at v1.35).

Chris Poole for answering questions about Internet programming.

Thanks to the anonymous artist of the original mailbox sprites. I think I
found them with Graham Allen's SLIPdial program, but neither he nor anyone on
c.s.a.programmer has responded to my request to tell me whence they came.

Peter Killworth, the first user to give feedback and bug reports, and whose
misunderstandings vastly improved the manual.


The author, comments and bugs
—————————————————————————————

I am contactable until July 1998 at least at [e-mail].

I'd appreciate reports of bugs or problems and suggestions for improvement
(though I don't have much time for the last, and the program does what I want
now; it could easily be expanded to do many other things but to do them well
would need considerable work).

There is a slight problem with the current version of MoreHelp which often
gives the wrong help for the menu in the Finger window. I'm trying to get Sam
Kington to sort this problem out; if he can't or won't I shall write my own
help code.

On the other hand, I welcome ideas for improvement of the documentation, and
ways of getting MailCheck to work with terminal programs not mentioned here.