Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:43:55 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Quoting
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 03:41 PM 4/22/05 EDT, MarkLFischer at aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 4/22/2005 2:43:51 PM Eastern  Daylight Time,
>omni at omniphile.com writes:
>>Why do you use it then?   There are generally several mail programs
>>available for any OS, and all  major, and not so major, OSs have at least
>>one that does, or can be made  to, quote properly.
>
>Hint:  Look at my email address.

I knew AOL had their own interface, but I wasn't aware that it didn't use
standard protocols.  I've never used AOL.  They really went out and
reinvented POP3/IMAP and SMTP for use with their user interface?  Or are
even using something other than TCP/IP between the client and the server or
don't support the usual socket interface at the client end?  Well, since
it's basically a "net beginners" service, limitations like that may be
acceptable... ;-)

You could still use the cut/paste and decent external editor method to get
away from the manual editing.  On OpenVMS the mail command is very
primitive.  It dates from the late 70s and was originally oriented for use
on DECnet or just within a standalone system (it's a multi-user OS).
Companies like the one I work for worked out how to make deal with internet
mail protocols too (I'm working on an IMAP enhancement at the moment for
instance) but we can't change the mail command itself...that's owned by the
OS (HP at the moment).  To handle quoting and ROT-13 and other internet
standard features I just wrote some macros for TPU (the text editor on VMS)
and told mail to dump messages to be replied to into a file, call TPU and
then suck the file back in again when it was done.

Net result was that I typed "REPLY/EXTRACT" (or just "REP/EX") and the
editor would pop up with the message contents in it...headers and all.  I
then hit F8, and the headers were stripped, the message was quoted, a "On
<date> <sender> said:" line was added, my standard sig was stuck at the
bottom, and a tagline was taken from the top of my taglines file, put at
the very end, and then moved to the bottom of the taglines file so it
wouldn't be reused again soon, and the cursor left on the first line of the
quoted text so I could start trimming and adding response text.  Worked
great, and was totally customizable.  Since Windows is a much more advanced
OS (or so the world seems to think) I'm sure there are lots of ways to do
this on that OS too...

If anyone knows of a non-emacs editor that's as powerful as TPU and
available on Windows and Linux, please let me know.  I've heard of an
attempt to write a TPU clone for Windows, but it costs hundreds of dollars
and doesn't work all that well, so I'm still looking...and thinking about
trying to create it myself if I can't find it.  I like TPU...it and emacs
are the two most powerful editors I know of, and I can't get along with
emacs (memory isn't good enough to keep track of all the key combinations
required).  For an idea about TPUs power, I helped write a Usenet News
client in TPU macros once.  There was a little bit of C code to handle the
socket interface, but the rest was all TPU.  It had subscription support,
tracked read messages, let you respond in the group or directly through
e-mail, did ROT-13 encoding, and all the other things you'd expect a news
client to do...and you could modify it while it was running (I added ROT-13
that way one day when I ran into a message that used it ;-).
If anyone wants to see this thing I can unlock my FTP server long enough to
let you grab it.  It's in a VMS Backup saveset though, so it probably
wouldn't be useful for anyone without a VMS system (anyone who wants their
own cluster, I have two small VAX workstations I don't need anymore...cheap!).

>My "other" email address is attached to my personal domain, which is parked
>unused on Yahoo until I can shift it to its own server, with spam filters I
>control, later this year.  At that time, I will shift most of my email
>business to that.

Once you have control of your own mail server there's no going back... ;-)

-- Mike B.
--
Never put off till tomorrow what you can ignore entirely.