Limitations

Unlisted conferences
BulkRate cannot currently send new mail to unlisted conferences.  Unlisted conferences are conferences which you cannot post to from your mailbox.  Using the threaded reply feature, you can, however, reply to messages in unlisted conferences.

Styled text
No font, size, style, or color information is available via the FirstClass® CLUI, so BulkRate cannot support styled text. 

Extended characters
The FirstClass® CLUI apparently supports only 7-bit ASCII (at least on transmission), so Macintosh extended characters (like: å∫ç∂´ƒ©˙ˆ∆˚¬µ˜øπœ®ß†¨√∑≈¥Ω¡™£¢∞§¶ªº–≠“‘…æ≤≥÷`«) are not reliably supported. This can cause problems when reading text that has these characters, especially "curly quotes", en and em dashes, and the like.  This problem is more important, however, in sending messages; if a user or conference has extended characters in its name, you may experience problems sending mail to that address.  Try abbreviating the name to work around this problem.  SoftArc really should address this issue, as it affects non-English speaking users of FirstClass® a great deal.

When sending a message, BulkRate will translate extended characters to standard ASCII.  This translation is controlled by STR# resource 5000.  You may edit this using ResEdit or a similar tool if you do not like the character translations I have chosen.  String 1 in the resource is the translation for character 128 (Ä), string 2 is the translation for character 129 (Å) and on to string 128, which is the translation for character 255.  To change the translation for character 180 (¥), you would edit string 53 (180 - 127 = 53) in STR# resource 5000.  Note that not all extended characters display the same in every font.
  
SoftArc has indicated that they plan to eventually release a "Client Toolkit" or "Client API," which would eliminate many of the shortcomings of using the FirstClass® CLUI as BulkRate's interface with FirstClass®.  A Client API should allow support for threaded messages and replies, styled text, and extended characters, among other things.

Currently known problems

• Text does not always scroll a full "page" when you click in the gray area of the scroll bars.

• Under System 6 on machines with 68000 processors (and perhaps other processors), windows do not redraw properly if the Palette is open.  They only workarounds currently are to either not use the Palette or to upgrade to System 7.