Howard,
I see you have many variations on your e-dress. How do you get Arachne list to
recognize them all?
>
As can be seen from the different opinions on this subject,
everyone seems to have their own favourites. As far as transport-
ing news over DOS PPP for offline reading, I use both UKA_PPP and
KA9Q/YAN. The only problem I've had with UKA_PPP is that it does
not seem able to connect to all versions of NNTP servers. While
KA9Q may be a bit more difficult to set up, I have not found an
NNTP server yet that it will not connect to. The more I use the
KA9Q stuff, the more I am impressed. An interesting hobby.
>
Problem with so many NNTP servers is that you can't usually access a server
other than your ISP's server. But I managed to connect to news.freewwweb.com
with UKA_PPP from the Freewwweb connection, and it worked even with the
username-password authentication.
I heard of but never worked with QWK, as BBSes gave way to the Internet. Same
is true of Fidonet. But there are still a few people who seem to use BBS-style
editors for mail or news, far outnumbered by Outlook Express users. Now I
notice occasionally an email or news message contains an embedded ASCII 26
character, which some readers can't or don't choose to handle. Another problem
in DOS occurs when the download file exceeds approximately 360 KB, or what will
fit in low memory. It certainly is annoying when a text editor or reader
pretends that the rest of a file after an ASCII 26 doesn't exist, and dangerous
if a file should be saved that way. Arachne can be used to read a news download
file, named to end in .MES. I don't know the size limitation, but have seen
Arachne mail reader go past an ASCII 26 successfully.
>
For accessing and posting to newsgroups I use PC-PINE, version 3.96 for
DOS. This program works fine as long as you can configure your memory
properly. Don't load NWCache. If you use NetDial, load epppd high.
One disadvantage of using PC-PINE for DOS is that it does not lend
itself well to working offline. Other than that, I think it is a great
program.
>
Using Pine under DR-DOS, I suppose I could unload NWCACHE and then reload before
starting Arachne? Otherwise Arachne becomes very slow and gives the hard drive
a hard drive, as happened to me before I downloaded DR-DOS 7.03. I downloaded
Pine 4.21 for OS/2 but haven't set it up yet. But I would need to be able to
read news offline, sometimes the download file is too big for low memory, and
occasionally there is an ASCII 26 in the middle or end of a message.
