Many moons ago I started running my BBS, connected to WhiConNet (and later Fidonet, LandNet and others). I used GEcho to process the FTN packets and all was well. Sort of. The version of GEcho I used didn't support JAM bases and to upgrade was going to cost money. I didn't have much money. So I played with Turbo Pascal in an attempt to come up with something that would toss messages. I didn't get very far and happened upon FMail which was free and supported JAM and worked, so I used that. Then lots later I found WaterGate, saw that it was good and paid for it. All this was in my DOS BBS days. Now I run my BBS under Linux and use FidoGate to process my mail. But it's not great. It breaks some standards and works by converting Fido stuff to usenet stuff. So, I have a vision. I will write an Open Source Fidonet mail tosser that will cope with tossing to news, JAM, *.MSG and anything else I can throw in. It will work happily under Linux, DOS and hopefully lots of other things.
Sorry, didn't mean to give you my Fidonet mail tosser life story there. Oops. :)
The plan of attack is to build in as much flexibility as possible. The basic features expected of such things will be there and hopefully a number of other things. Support is envisaged for the following:
Well, I do have some code working that'll toss messages into HTML. It shouldn't be too hard to get this working for *.msg, but I need to do some work on the structs for writing out the files. After I get that cleanly working I'll start on the tossing the messages into packets stuff, which shouldn't prove too hard as all the grunt work has been done.
Someday I'll tidy some of the code up and actually put it here for people to laugh it. It's of no use just yet, but if you really want to see it email me and I'll think about it.
This will be distributed according to the GNU Public License and is being developed by Jonathan McDowell.
Last updated: 28th July 1999
© Project Purple 1999