Although the name may confuse you at first, uupc stands for UUCP for PCs and is a play on the standard term UUCP, which is short for Unix to Unix CoPy. Like Mac/gnuucp and UUCP/Connect, uupc is a UUCP transport program and, like Mac/gnuucp, it only transports the UUCP files. It doesn't provide an interface for reading or writing email, although a related program that ships with uupc, pcmail, does provide email access. However, pcmail's email access is limited in such a way that I think I can safely say no one will use pcmail for more than about ten minutes.
uupc is a Macintosh port of publicly available source code, and versions exist for numerous platforms including DOS, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST. The original code apparently came from DOS, which accounts for some of the configuration quirks. The initial port to the Macintosh was performed by Stuart Lynne. Later, Dave Platt coordinated a group of Macintosh programmers on the Internet to come up with the most recent release, version 3.1.
Because uupc stems from public code and was created by a team of unrelated programmers, the uupc programmers encourage users to distribute the package for free, along with source code if you want. However, the programmers do retain the copyright, which means that you cannot legally base a commercial program on the uupc source code without getting permission from each of the many authors first.
Version 3.1 of uupc reportedly fixes some troublesome spots in 3.0 and adds optional support for the Communications Toolbox. CTB support means that you can use any CTB tool with uupc, even (presumably) a Telnet tool such as the TGE TCP Tool from Tim Endres. You can also have uupc connect two Macs on the same network using the ADSP tool. I haven't tested these new features, but the documentation that come with uupc 3.1 should help explain it as well as I could at this point.
Installing uupc is trickier than installing Mac/gnuucp. Although you must provide the same sorts of information, the MailReader stack that comes with Mac/gnuucp makes entering it easier. To configure uupc, you need a copy of ResEdit, Apple's free resource editor. If you don't have ResEdit or don't know what it is or how to use it, you probably don't want to attempt to install and configure uupc. However, you can get ResEdit on the Internet in:
ftp://ftp.support.apple.com/pub/apple_sw_updates/US/mac/utils/
Luckily, the documentation and examples that come with uupc are quite good and complete, although you must read carefully (especially in a few places to determine where to place certain files). In addition, the documentation includes a copy of the posting entitled "Becoming a USENET site." This is the standard document on the topic and is posted to the news.answers newsgroup periodically. For those people who have never touched UUCP before, there are also references to three useful books: Managing UUCP and USENET, by Tim O'Reilly and Grace Todino, from O'Reilly & Associates; Unix Communications, by Bart Anderson, Barry Costales, and Harry Henderson, published by The Waite Group; and Using UUCP and USENET, by Grace Todino and Dale Dougherty, again published by O'Reilly & Associates.
To begin, you make a copy of Sample UUPC settings file, rename it UUPC Settings, and place it in the same folder as the uupc program. Double-click on the file to open it in ResEdit, double-click on the STR icon, and you see a list of all the STR resources. Double-click on any of them and you see another window for entering the actual string (see figure 15.8).
Figure 15.8: uupc configuration in ResEdit.
You must go through each of the STR resources and replace the sample information with the appropriate information for your setup. The only hard part is you must provide full pathnames for the folder listed in HOME, MAILDIR, CONFDIR, and so on (uupc will create these folders later, so here you tell it where to do so). Macintosh users seldom have to deal with pathnames, but suffice it to say that a pathname is the name of the hard disk, a colon, the name of a folder, a colon, a name of another folder, and so on.
Note: Because you are hard-coding the pathnames to these folders, decide now where you want the uupc folder to live on your hard disk, and what you want it to be called. Also, keep in mind that if you change the name of the hard disk or any folder above the uupc folder, all hell will break loose.Mac/gnuucp and UUCP/Connect both circumvent this pathname difficulty by enabling you to place the folders in the same folder as the program and then assuming the special folders are there unless you state otherwise.
Finally, if one of the folders above your destination folder is on the desktop, you must add Desktop Folder to the path after the hard disk name. So, for instance, my mail folder is called Perseus:Desktop Folder:uucp:mail. (The part of the path reading uucp:mail was created by uupc. The reversed p's and c's are not a mistake; uupc simply considers this your UUCP mail folder path.)
Just as with Mac/gnuucp, in uupc the values that you must provide in terms of username, nodename, and so on are fairly obvious. The documentation describes each one. After you've added the names, double-click on uupc itself to launch it, and then quit immediately. uupc creates the necessary folders for you in the places you've specified.
The Systems file is another story. Like the l.sys file in Mac/gnuucp, the Systems file contains the information necessary to call and negotiate a connection with a remote host. Even though uupc includes more examples than Mac/gnuucp, I had a lot more trouble getting it to connect and chat with various UUCP implementations. A Sample Systems file comes with uupc; copy it and shamelessly plagiarize the provided entries (use TeachText or SimpleText to edit the file). Be sure to rename your copy Systems and place it in the config folder that uupc created for you. Be prepared to edit that file continually as you troubleshoot your connection.
After you have the Systems file in place, you can use pcmail to create a test message to send out and boomerang back. Double-click on pcmail. You should see a console window that looks amazingly like the command-line window that Mac/gnuucp uses. I suspect they were created with the same compiler (see figure 15.9).
Figure 15.9: pcmail console window.
To send a message out and receive it back again, you use a clever old trick called bang-style addressing. If you write an address listing your host's name, your machine's name, and your userid, all separated only by exclamation points, a UUCP program knows to send the message to your host, which then sees that it was destined for your machine and sends the message right back, and your machine sees that you should receive the message.
As you can see in figure 15.9, I've made up a new site called polarbear, and I'm using tidbits as my host (this setup actually worked -- I had uupc running on my PowerBook 100, calling my SE/30 running UUCP/Connect on the second phone line).
Note: Of course, you can see some smoke and mirrors here, because I wasn't able to get the nice grayscale screenshots on the monochrome PowerBook 100 screen, but what is life without some mystery?
After you enter the address in that specific format, click on the OK button to enter the pcmail editing environment (see figure 15.10).
Figure 15.10: pcmail editing environment.
The pcmail program makes even Unix mail seem friendly and full-featured. You must type your own header information, such as the Subject line, and when you're finished (making sure to press Return at the end of every line), you finish the message by pressing Control-D, just as in Unix. Of course, the title of the window changes to let you know how to exit the program. I think this feature qualifies as a negative interface, and that's the last thing I'm going to say about using pcmail, in part because that's all it does. I recommend ignoring it after your first test message.
Now, to send the message. Launch uupc by double-clicking on it. You should see a line saying "Welcome to uupc!" and another line with the current time and the word "Idle." From the File menu, select Debug Level and type 2 in the dialog; then click on OK.
Next, take a look at the Call menu. It provides excellent flexibility in terms of who you call and when. If you've set up the features correctly, you should have one or more entries (uupc can easily handle calling multiple UUCP hosts) at the bottom of the menu (see figure 15.12).
Figure 15.12: uupc Call menu.
To test your configuration so far, select your host's name from the bottom of the menu. If all goes well, uupc dials the host, sends the waiting message, and retrieves any messages set to come in (not that there are likely to be any, yet). Because the host takes a few minutes to process the message, take a short break and then call again to receive it.
Unless you are extremely lucky or extremely talented, of course, your configuration won't work. My first attempt worked perfectly, but subsequent tries to different machines failed for hours. If the configuration doesn't work for you, check the information in the UUCP Settings file. After that, puzzle over the variables in the Systems file. Problems usually appear in two areas: the modem configuration and the chat script. The modem configuration is a pain to figure out, but you can use any terminal emulator to log in to your UUCP host, trying different modem initialization strings until the two modems connect reliably. It's often a good idea to start at a least common denominator, such as 2,400 bps, and work up from that point.
A terminal emulator can help with the chat script as well. The chat script is the series of commands that the two machines pass back and forth to log in and start the UUCP conversation. In general, here's what happens: Your machine sends a return to wake up the host, the host replies with a login prompt, your machine sends the login name, the host asks for the password, your machine sends it, and then the host responds with a line starting with Shere. If you get to that point, the two machines should start the UUCP conversation and start transferring files. Watching the debug messages can help determine where things are going wrong, although I often find the debug messages difficult to understand.
The nicest part of uupc is its flexibility in terms of calling multiple hosts and running automatically at scheduled times. You can create a Schedule file (a sample is provided) that contains one or more lines listing the exact times and days that uupc should call out. Keep in mind that in order for this exercise to work, uupc must be running, because it has no way of launching itself (QuicKeys from CE Software helps automate launching). Also, you want uupc to be in the foreground on your Macintosh. If it's running in the background, it may manage to dial out, but the performance is poor.
Note: When you're configuring the Schedule file, each line must contain the minute, hour, day, month, weekday, and the host machine you want to call. The first five variables are all in numeric format, and you can provide multiple entries by separating them with commas; more importantly, if you replace the entry with an asterisk, the task happens every day, month, weekday, and so on. The documentation fails to make this point crystal clear, but it's a useful shortcut.
The other advantage uupc has over Mac/gnuucp is that it works well with other email programs and can also easily transfer Usenet news. (Note, however, that it cannot process news in any way after transferring it; you need ToadNews, a separate program, to process the received news at that point.) Dave Platt, one of the primary authors of uupc, makes a shareware email program called Fernmail that works well with uupc and has a similar configuration scheme (which isn't good, but it is familiar). You also can use Steve Dorner's excellent Eudora email program. The combination of ToadNews and rnMac or TheNews enables you to read news transferred by uupc. All of these programs are either freeware or shareware, so you can put together a nice little package for a small financial investment. In terms of time, however, your investment may be fairly hefty.
uupc is definitely not for weenies or people who need hand-holding. Despite the added trouble I had setting it up on my system, though, I must say that it's a better choice for many people than Mac/gnuucp -- especially for those with more than basic requirements, because of the combination of the flexibility in scheduling and the capability of working with powerful email programs such as Eudora.
I don't mean to imply that uupc is perfect in any way, shape, or form. One minor improvement would be to provide configuration assistance within the program rather than requiring the use of ResEdit. Although ResEdit is free, it's not universally available or the configuration environment of choice. Since the first edition of this book, Mark Assad's UUPC Setup program has appeared to simplify this task, although it's an imperfect solution.
Also, I found that the information provided with uupc was more useful than the relatively sparse documentation that came with Mac/gnuucp. This is due in part to the fact that uupc does more than Mac/gnuucp, but that's not the entire story. Of course, the additional information can potentially confuse the user more, because UUCP is, in fact, a rather complex and multifaceted transport protocol; trying to understand it beyond the basics can daunt even the most sophisticated novice.
Aim questions or comments about uupc to Dave Platt via email at dplatt@snulbug.mtview.ca.us. Remember that because uupc is a free program, the support you get may reflect what you paid for the program. You can find uupc in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/uucp/
I mention Eudora whenever I talk about email programs because, frankly, it's just about the best out there, and it's free. Steve Dorner designed Eudora to work with MacTCP primarily, but along the way he added some clever features that allow it to work with UUCP as well. I refrain from talking about Eudora in depth here, because it's primarily a MacTCP program, but I want to touch quickly on the configuration issues so that UUCP users see how to set it up. After that, you can check out the section in chapter 21, "MacTCP-Based Email," to learn why Eudora is so cool.
Since most of my mail used to come into my Centris 660AV via a UUCP account to InterCon's UUCP/Connect, I set up Eudora in UUCP mode here at home so my wife Tonya could read mail on her Duo 230 without having to kick me off of my Mac. It worked extremely well, so allow me to share how we did it. First, all of the mail to tidbits.com came into my 660AV via UUCP/Connect, which stores messages in mailboxes corresponding to the userid in the message -- hence all of my mail ended up in a mailbox called ace. We decided that Tonya's userid would be tonya, and simply advertised her address as tonya@tidbits.com, so all of her mail ended up in a UUCP/Connect mailbox called tonya. We had a LocalTalk network between my 660AV and her Duo 230, and System 7 File Sharing running on my machine, so she could mount my hard disk on her desktop and use it just as though it were a local hard disk.
We configured Eudora to look for new mail in the mailbox called tonya on my hard disk, which, as I said, she mounted over the network so that it looked like a local disk. We also set Eudora to send messages back into the UUCP/Connect spool:uucp folder, which is where UUCP/Connect processes all of its outgoing mail.
Tonya first made sure my hard disk was mounted over the network, then told Eudora to check for new mail. Eudora read the contents of the tonya mailbox on my hard disk and brought the new messages into Tonya's In mailbox in Eudora. Tonya could then disconnect, and since she uses a Duo, go anywhere she wants to read and reply to email. When she wanted to send responses back out, she had to connect to my machine over the network again and tell Eudora to send the queued messages, which Eudora deposited in UUCP/Connect's outgoing mail folder.
We ran into two quirks. First, UUCP/Connect must be set not to be the domain name server for the tidbits.com domain (or it freaks because it cannot find where the messages are supposed to go). Second, Tonya's messages must be processed by UUCP/Connect's command machine before they're actually sent out, since Eudora creates an intermediate file that requires processing. This was easily circumvented by created a background task in UUCP/Connect that ran the command machine every hour.
Although only Tonya read mail using Eudora in this way on our network, there's no reason why it couldn't work for essentially any number of users with a single copy of UUCP/Connect on a server doing the mail transfer. I personally like Eudora more than LAN email packages such as QuickMail and Microsoft Mail, so it might be an excellent solution for a small office.
From Eudora's Special menu, choose Settings. A configuration dialog box appears with a scrolling list of icons down the left side, each offering different configuration choices. Only two settings are particularly important for UUCP use, however (see figure 15.13).
Figure 15.13: Eudora UUCP configuration.
Click on the Hosts icon in the scrolling list so you can edit the preferences for POP Account and SMTP server, since that's where the UUCP configuration information goes. The first field, labeled POP Account, should contain an exclamation point and then the full pathname of the file that holds your email. This file is generally located in your mail folder and usually has the same name as your userid.
Next, in the field labeled SMTP, place four pieces of information, each starting with an exclamation point. Insert an exclamation point, then the UUCP name of your Mac, another exclamation point, then the full pathname of the folder where outgoing files should go (note that this pathname must end with a colon because it's a folder, not a file), another exclamation point, then your userid, a final exclamation point, and a four digit number that Eudora increments by one each time you mail a letter. Eudora must keep that number unique for each message to avoid confusing things. You may as well type four zeroes for the sequence number.
Note: In our Eudora setup, even though Tonya worked on a different Mac, since she essentially used my hard disk as hers, she used tidbits as the UUCP name of her Macintosh for the Eudora configuration.
Although you should configure other preferences in Eudora, especially Real Name and Return Address in the Personal Information section, you can ignore the Connection Method buttons in the Getting Started section. When you're finished, click on the OK button to save your configuration changes.
The one quirk of using Eudora for UUCP is that you must remember that Eudora thinks it's connected to a network. Thus, depending on the way you've set various switches within Eudora, email doesn't automatically come in and go out. For instance, when you want get your mail, you must use Check Mail from the File menu even though the mail is already sitting on your disk (since the UUCP transport agent handles the actual transmission). When you want to send mail, you must use Send Queued Messages, also from the File menu. This quirk is not a big deal, and you get used it very quickly.
If you use UUCP for email purposes, you owe it to yourself to check out Eudora. It competes well even with commercial applications, and there are now two branches of Eudora evolution. The 1.5 series (now at 1.5.1) remains free and is included on the disk with this book, whereas the 2.1 series (now at 2.1.2) costs $65 per copy (there are discounts for site licenses). The 2.1 series includes a few additional features, most notably mail filtering options, which are extremely handy.
You can retrieve Eudora from either of the following directories:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/
If you want to sign up to receive more information about Eudora, send email to eudora-info@qualcomm.com. There's also a Eudora mailing list you can join, which is probably the best place to ask for help if you're having trouble. To subscribe, send email to
So what about reading Usenet news, anyway? I've danced around the subject for a while now because this territory can be fairly difficult to understand. Usenet news comes into your machine in batches (sometimes compressed) that a newsreader cannot understand. To convert these batches into usable files for a newsreader, you must have a program that can do the unbatching. Currently, the only stand-alone program that unbatches files (UUCP/Connect does it internally) is John Mah's ToadNews. ToadNews can handle either compressed or uncompressed batches, and the latest release, 1.1, can handle an external decompressor program as well.
Note: John added support for an external decompressor so that he'd be able to add support for gzip files later on.
ToadNews provides several administrative features. It not only unbatches news files and places them in the appropriate folders, but it also expires old news from your disk; that is, after a few days or weeks, it deletes old articles, thus saving hard disk space. ToadNews enables you to edit which newsgroups receive articles, and it can do all of its tasks quietly in the background.
Although ToadNews theoretically can work with other UUCP transport agents and other newsreaders, it has been closely integrated with uupc and Roy Wood's rnMac newsreader. It's also used in the MacTCP world along with rnMac and a program called MacSlurp, which plays the role of the news transport agent, albeit over MacTCP-based connections rather than UUCP. Finally, John tells me that ToadNews can now process SOUP packets such as those generated by uqwk, a program that collects mail and news and formats it for offline reading. uqwk is mostly associated with certain BBS formats, although there's a program called MacSOUP that enables Mac users to work with SOUP packets -- see chapter 14, "Shell Account Enhancements," for more on MacSOUP.
The first step in installing ToadNews is to create a folder in which it will work. Your news lives in this folder. The documentation recommends that you call this folder News and put it at the same level as the spool folder that uupc uses.
Actually, I lied. The first real step is to talk to your provider and arrange to have a newsfeed turned on. You must know which groups you want, because there's no way you can handle all of them. Although most administrators will happily change the set of groups you receive, they don't want to make changes frequently, so store them up and only ask every now and then.
ToadNews internally detects if the incoming news is compressed, so you don't have to set that manually, but you might want to mention to your system administrator that you can handle compressed news since it's so much faster to transfer.
Launch ToadNews. A log window appears, telling you nicely that you must configure the program before you do anything else. From the ToadNews menu, select the hierarchical Preferences menu and then Unbatcher Preferences. You see the Unbatcher Preferences dialog (see figure 15.14).
Figure 15.14: ToadNews Unbatcher Preferences dialog.
In this dialog box, you must enter three items. Type the name of your UUCP host in the UUCP node name field. ToadNews accepts only eight characters here, which is odd because UUCP hosts can have names longer than eight characters (I cheated and took the screenshot before ToadNews complained to me). Next, click on the topmost Select button. ToadNews displays a Standard File dialog so that you can find the directory in which news arrives. This spool folder is the same one uupc uses. Select the appropriate directory and then click on OK. Next, click on the lower Select button to choose the folder in which you want ToadNews to store messages after it unbatches the news file. You should have already created a News folder at the same level as your spool folder, so navigate to that folder and select it.
The remaining options are more or less self-explanatory. ToadNews allows cross-posting and even uses aliases for cross-posted articles, so you don't have to waste disk space on multiple copies of the same article. You almost certainly will want to raise the number of minutes between which ToadNews scans for new files unless you connect to your host every minute. Also, make sure that the Automatically add new newsgroups option is checked at first; otherwise, you have to add your newsgroups manually. After a while, you may want to shut off the automatic newsgroup-adding feature, because it gives you all the groups that people cross-post to as well. You might end up with alt.sheep, for example, if someone cross-posted there from comp.sys.mac.comm. Finally, a new option can save articles with an invalid format to the newsgroup called junk for later perusal.
You also can configure the Expirer Preferences and the Window Preferences in that hierarchical Preferences menu, but because the defaults work fine, I'll let you play with them on your own. Basically, the Expirer Preferences enable you to set how quickly articles expire and when ToadNews should check for old articles. The Windows Preferences enable you to set which windows appear and what information is logged. In version 1.1, ToadNews has preferences for decompressing batches (you can use an external program if you want) and threading messages (again, you can use an external program). Finally, there are now preferences for the actions ToadNews should perform on startup (see figure 15.15).
Figure 15.15: ToadNews Startup Preferences.
Most of the time you shouldn't have to mess with ToadNews too much, because it can quite happily work on unbatching and expiring news in the background while you work on other things. If you want to invoke it manually, you can either drag a newsbatch file onto the ToadNews icon (assuming you're using System 7) or from the File menu use either Unbatch or Unbatch Batch Folder (see figure 15.16).
Figure 15.16: ToadNews File menu.
You can expire old news in all the active newsgroups by selecting Expire All Newsgroups. Choosing this option is a great way to clean up your hard disk quickly when you need some free space fast. New in version 1.1 is the option to schedule everything that ToadNews can do (see figure 15.17).
Figure 15.17: ToadNews Scheduler.
The rest of the interaction you have with ToadNews is limited to the Active Newsgroups window, accessible when you choose Show Newsgroups from the Windows menu (see figure 15.18).
Figure 15.18: ToadNews Active Newsgroups window.
You can add newsgroups manually if ToadNews doesn't add them automatically. I've added some bogus newsgroups, and just for fun I modified a few article counts to make them look more real. Normally, you don't touch the article counts. You can also remove, edit, and expire newsgroups from this window.
Because ToadNews mostly works unattended, it's hard for me to point at any special features that you might notice without your knowing more about the low-level Internet standards that ToadNews supports. Suffice it to say that ToadNews does some neat stuff at low levels that the user never sees.
Although it doesn't have extensive support for Apple events, ToadNews does support a few custom Apple events (and thus scripting programs such as AppleScript and Frontier) that help you automate tasks such as unbatching, expiring, and launching external threaders.
Speaking of the external threader, ToadNews enables you to select one for further processing of the news after ToadNews has unbatched it. At the moment, only rnMac can help here, but letting the newsreader do the threading generally enables the newsreader to run much faster. In theory, other programs could act as the external threader to provide access to the news in something like a Hermes BBS message file.
The latest version of ToadNews has a nice floating palette for unbatching and expiring progress bars.
I should also note that the combination of uupc, ToadNews, and rnMac consumes less RAM and disk space than UUCP/Connect, which merges the features of all three into a single program. If you don't have a large amount of disk space and one to two megabytes of RAM to devote to news, the freeware/shareware combination might be a better fit for you, and it's certainly cheaper. Depending on your specific setup, the combination of freeware and shareware might be more flexible as well, since you can pick and choose among several different transport mechanisms and newsreaders, all working more or less transparently with ToadNews.
If you want to use UUCP but cannot afford UUCP/Connect, the combination of uupc, ToadNews, and (coming up next) rnMac provides an inexpensive way for you to read a small amount of news. Nothing else in the shareware arena does what ToadNews does, so if you need it, you need it. How's that for a nice tight tautology?
ToadNews was not designed for heavy-duty newsfeeds. Therefore, if you plan to get a full feed, don't even consider ToadNews. (For that matter, don't really even consider using UUCP/Connect -- that kind of volume begs for Unix software and a dedicated high-speed Internet connection.) In addition, ToadNews cannot forward news on to another person. In other words, with ToadNews you become a leaf site, a site that receives news and can send it back to the host but cannot pass it on. That capability would require ToadNews to batch news as well, something it doesn't do at the moment.
ToadNews is $25 (in U.S. or Canadian dollars) shareware, or, if you are a programmer, John Mah will trade you for a copy of whatever program you've written. Otherwise, if you use ToadNews for three weeks, send John the money. You can contact him via email at jpmah@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca. ToadNews is available in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/uucp/
Roy Wood's rnMac is the third essential part of getting a UUCP newsfeed working without spending a lot of money. It is a fairly full-featured newsreader with a decent interface and low shareware payment of $25. With rnMac, you can read incoming Usenet articles and reply to them either via email or as follow-ups to the newsgroup. Other newsreaders often have more functions, but when it comes right down to it, reading and replying are the two basic functions they must support to be useful.
Again, the combination of rnMac and ToadNews also works with MacSlurp, which is a MacTCP-based program for slurping in batches of news from an NNTP server, at which point ToadNews unbatches them and rnMac reads the news.
Roy Wood and Dave Platt should really get together. Although rnMac has a settings file that you can edit with ResEdit if you like (and it even resembles the uupc and Fernmail settings files), Roy also has provided a simple dialog that enables you to configure rnMac from within the program (see figure 15.19).
Figure 15.19: rnMac Settings dialog.
I'm not going through all these items once again because, on the whole, they're the same sort that uupc and Fernmail require. The only confusing part is that you should use the same folders uupc uses rather than create another set, and rnMac may create a set of them for you automatically. Therefore, if you end up with two sets, you must trash one of them. Similarly, rnMac and ToadNews must agree where the spooled news lives and where to place the processed messages.
Note: You may wish to use aliases to the programs to make them more accessible, rather than having them all live in the same folder.
After you have uupc, ToadNews, and rnMac set up, using rnMac is the least of your worries. The newsgroups your machine receives show up in the omnipresent Subscribed Groups window. If there's nothing there, you must first subscribe to some groups. From the Groups menu choose List Active Newsgroups, then select a newsgroup in the Active Groups window and select Subscribe from the Groups menu. Alternatively, you can simply double-click on a group in the Active Groups window to subscribe to it.
In the Subscribed Groups window, the number next to the group name indicates how many messages are in it. Double-clicking on a newsgroup brings up the newsgroup window. This window displays two scrollable panes, the sender and the subject of each message in one and the text of the message in the other (see figure 15.20).
Figure 15.20: rnMac newsgroup window.
You can use the arrow keys to move up and down in the list of the messages (which you do not see in the screen shot because I simulated only one message, and not very well at that -- I forgot to change the default name and ended up with Bart Simpson).
Note: If Matt Groening's lawyers are reading this book, it was an accident!
If you look at the Articles menu, you can see the majority of rnMac's newsreading features, which are about all that you should need (see figure 15.21).
Figure 15.21: rnMac Articles menu.
Most importantly, rnMac understands threads in newsgroups (by Subject/Date), so you can follow threads and kill them, two important features. With rnMac, you also can determine which articles show and which don't. It also makes marking articles as read or unread simple. The Post To Group hierarchical menu is a nice touch, too, because your subscribed newsgroups are in that menu for easy posting.
One unnerving aspect about rnMac is that it can handle threading in the background. That means that it scans the current articles constantly and determines which ones you've read and which should remain. This process results in an article occasionally disappearing from the upper article list in a newsgroup window as rnMac realizes that you've read it. Yes, Virginia, there is a ghost in the machine.
Along with its newsreading capabilities, rnMac includes a simple email capability. It uses an interface similar to the newsreader and provides only a single mailbox, but if you have extremely small email requirements, it might suffice. As in Fernmail, in rnMac posting either news or email opens a text window that has the header filled in for you but is completely accessible. This feature always makes me nervous because it's all too easy to edit something accidentally in the header and screw up the message.
New in rnMac 1.3b6 is the capability to have rnMac call Eudora via Apple events and create email replies that way. Frankly, Eudora does email well -- there's no reason for everyone to attempt to reinvent such a useful tool.
rnMac can save messages to text files, which in itself isn't all that impressive, but it can also debinhex during the save if you wish. For files not in rnMac already, it includes Convert From BinHex and Convert To BinHex options in the File menu.
Note: For those who read Chinese, rnMac theoretically can convert back and forth between GB and HZ, two methods of representing Chinese text.
In its Edit menu, rnMac provides commands for pasting certain smileys and acronyms (and you can edit these in ResEdit). You can also paste with the quoting feature turned on. rnMac can also rot13 messages, change the font and size of the different windows, and -- for those who really like to play -- change the background color.
Finally, rnMac can act as an external threader application for ToadNews. The utility of this is that rnMac is faster than ToadNews at generating the threading information and faster generally as well, since any newsreader that threads its own messages can place them in whatever format it likes, thus speeding up execution later on.
I cannot say that rnMac is the best newsreader I've seen or even the best one on the Mac, but it does have most of the necessary features supported by a good interface.
Roy Wood has done a ton of work enhancing rnMac and, from the sounds of it, has plans to do even more. Roy plans to add more nonstandard shortcut keys that will address my only real complaint with rnMac: the fact that it doesn't have sufficient reading shortcuts. The process of creating the settings should improve in the future, too. We can also expect added features such as uudecoding, enhanced editing, MIME support, and message sorting. Finally, Roy claims he plans to add support for MacTCP and NNTP in a future version as well, which might turn rnMac into a nice shareware solution for offline news via MacTCP as well. I look forward to new versions.
Although it has no balloon help, rnMac has rather good online help currently located in the Apple menu. If you intend to use the program, you should definitely read the help text closely.
Like ToadNews, rnMac is $25 shareware (money orders or Canadian checks only, Roy asks). It forces you to click on a button labeled "No, I'm a shareware leech" to get into the program until you register. You can contact Roy by email at rrwood@io.org. And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, you can get the latest version of rnMac in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/uucp/