===================================================================== M I N I - H O S T for Microsoft Windows ----------------------------------- Data Management and Mail Processing ----------------------------------- Annotation to the demo-version Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, SuperPhysica Center, St.Petersburg, Russia. ===================================================================== This document is a brief description of Mini-Host project and its demonstration version. It is intended to help you in installation and evaluating the demo version as well as to better imagine the project's concepts, features and perspectives. The document is written under a supposition that the reader is familiar both with basics of Microsoft Windows graphical environment and basics of electronic mail. We strongly recommend you to read this document before you start the installation procedure. It's quite small but all the significant information is concentrated here. CONTENTS ------------------------------------------------------------------ GENERAL INSTALLATION Software Requirements Hardware Requirements Installation Procedure DEMO EVALUATION Creating Database of Users Modem SetUp Using WinUUCP as an External Mail Transport Agent Mail Procesing CAUTIONS TRADEMARKS AND COPYRIGHTS CREDITS GENERAL ------------------------------------------------------------------ Mini-Host is an integrated software package for E-mail and data processing. It works under Microsoft Windows graphical environment. Mini-Host package should give you an ability to have a convenient networking environment under Microsoft Windows. It should allow you either to organize a quite powerful email host on your PC, or to get your PC integrated into external network. It should allow you to keep all your various data (messages, conference articles, pictures, documents and other files) in the same database; each data item could be easily transferred via network without any extra efforts of encoding and packing. The demo version is of limited part of the entire project. It includes two main parts of Mini-Host package only: the mail user agent (MUA) - Data Manager, and the mail transport agent (MTA) - WinUUCP Communications. Demo contains several Windows applications that are not self-demonstrating ones, so you may figure their "real behavior". Each part of the demo (MUA and MTA) can be installed separately (see the INSTALLATION section of this document). INSTALLATION ------------------------------------------------------------------ Software Requirements To run demonstration version of Mini-Host, you should have Microsoft Windows 3.0 or later installed on your computer. To get the best look of some interface elements you should also have two standard Windows fonts installed - Helvetica and Courier. Since the project is oriented to Windows 3.1 we strongly recommend to run demo under this version of Windows. The behavior of demo applications under MS Windows 3.0 may cause some problems. Hardware Requirements You should have at least about 1.6 Mb of free space on your hard disk to keep demo system files and to create a minimal databases during evaluation. We recommend to use a PC with 4 Mb of RAM or more, although the applications can run with less memory. As for video, it would be better to look at the demo with VGA or higher resolution. Installation Procedure If you have got the demo installation files in the archived form you should unpack the archive either into 1.44 Mb diskette or into separate temporary directory on your hard drive (e.g. C:\TMP). Then you should launch Microsoft Windows (if you are running MS DOS) and start the INSTALL.EXE application. Just as the main windows appears, you have to choose Setup / Settings menu item and specify some parameters in a dialog box: INSTALL - you may install either entire demo, or one of two parts (mail user agent or mail transport agent) of product. DIRECTORIES Windows - the MS Windows directory on your machine (is determined automatically) where initialization files are to be placed. Source - directory of the source binaries for installation (should be determined automatically). Executables - directory where all the demo executable files should be placed. Database - directory where all the databases should be created. Mail - directory where mail system files (spooler, routes and aliases tables) should be placed. OPTIONS Install BWCC - demo applications uses the Borland's Windows custom control DLL (BWCC.DLL); if you already have this library installed on your machine do not check on this option. Create Group - if you use the Program Manager as a shell in your Windows graphical environment, you may check on this option and the setup program creates special application group for Mini-Host demo applications. Just as you have specified all the required settings you may choose Setup / Go! menu item to start the actual installation. DEMO EVALUATION ------------------------------------------------------------------ Here we would like to suggest you the most effective scenario of demo evaluation (where you can avoid some redundant difficulties). Creating Database of Users Since the Users Database is empty after the installation the first step is to fill it by some data. To do this you have to run User Server application and register one or more users of the system. First, you should register one human user to be an administrator of the system (the most appropriate name of that user is "postmaster"). NB! Take care of the first human user - he should have highest access permission to be able to maintain database of users in the future. See Q&A.TXT file for more details about user registration procedure. If you wish to evaluate MUA part of system (Data Manager) you have to register one or more additional human users to be able to send at least local mail between them. Do not forget to specify a home directory for each user where all the user-specific parameters should be kept. If you wish to evaluate MTA part of the system (WinUUCP) you have to register at least one UNIX host (your uplink or boss node) in the Users Database. Pay your attention to difference between log-in and log-out passwords for registered UNIX hosts: the former are for those hosts to access your machine, the latter are for you to access those hosts when you call them. NB! If you are going to write test letters and to send them you must specify your host's main attributes (name, domain, etc.) in the corresponding section of WinUUCP's setup. Otherwise, all your outgoing mail will not have a valid source address. Modem SetUp If you are going to evaluate MTA, you should tune WinUUCP to work with your modem properly. Primarily, you have to specify correct COM port your modem is attached to, and modem-specific commands (use documentation supplied to your hardware). Using WinUUCP as an External Mail Transport Agent Our MTA - WinUUCP application - can be used as an external mail transport agent for several famous Windows-based E-mail packages. There is WUSMAIL.EXE application to be an entry point to WinUUCP. For example, see CMM.SET file to get information about how to use WinUUCP with Cinetic Mail Manager. Mail Procesing Our MUA - Data Manager - allows you to perform almost all the basic mail operations. Also it provides some additional features. You can evaluate the following operations and procedures in demo version: - creation, modification and support of tree-like structure of folders; - creation and sending of new mail; replying and forwarding of received mail; - mporting of messages from standard mailboxes on your machine and vise versa; - encoding/decoding of mail by means of built-in UUENCODE/UUDECODE converter; - simple searching operations in mail database; - creation and usage of simple Address Database; - usage of mail message templates and patterns; - etc. We suppose that some user interface details of Data Manager (and maybe even overall user interface concept) are quite different from what we have ever seen among various mail-related software products. So the primer interest for us would be your responses about user interface of the product. This would affect the future development of the entire project. CAUTIONS ------------------------------------------------------------------ The main limitations of the demo version of Mini-Host are: 1) WinUUCP allows you to transfer a limited number of messages per session. 2) WinUUCP does not contain any internal call scheduler. 3) WinUUCP does not allow to transfer squeezed mail. 4) Data Manager does not support any external mail transfer agent except WinUUCP. 5) Data Manager does not allow to store files (objects) except ordinary mail messages. 6) Data Manager does not allow to handle messages that have size larger than 32 Kb. 7) Data Manger does not fully support access rights distinguishing between users of the system. Also it does not provide automatic mail confidentiality. 8) Data Manager does not have any additional features to ease netnews (electronic conferences) handling. 9) There is no any help supplied to the applications (neither on-line nor documentation) except this document and Q&A.TXT file. However, you may ask us directly for any help information (see CREDITS section of this document). Data Manager is not fully optimized for speed (we hope this is not a great problem, but our main goal of demo distribution is to get responses primarily about user interface concepts used in Mini-Host). Data Manager still may contain some bugs, so we do not guarantee that the mail database created by demo version would not be corrupted one day. There is some special utility to repair corrupted databases, but it is not included in demo package. Some troubles may occur when you try to terminate applications in unappropriate order. The best sequence is to launch User Server first, then WinUUCP, then Data Manager and to terminate applications in the reverse order. Demonstration package has not a perfect defence against all users' mistakes. So some non-trivial user's actions may cause the system to fail. TRADEMARKS AND COPYRIGHTS ------------------------------------------------------------------ MS DOS and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. BWCC.DLL is copyrighted by Borland International. This demonstartion package is being under the copyright of SuperPhysica Center. It may be freely distributed provided neither applicaation, nor this document are not modified. CREDITS ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Mini-Host project is developed by SuperPhysica Center, St.Petersburg, Russia. Software development team: Wojciech Rizhy - ideas, system analysis. Yaroslav Mezheritsky - senjor project manager, user interface. Eugene Vernikovsky - databases. Alex Shturm - communications. Administration: Levon Grigorian - commercial director. Kirill Dmitriev - manager. Contact us: Internet/Relcom: minihost@sph.spb.su minihost%sph.spb.su@ussr.eu.net Sovam Teleport/IASNet: sph@sovamsu.sovusa.com FidoNet: 2:5030/43.6 Snail: SuperPhysica Center, 190031, POB 418, St.Petersburg, Russia. Phone: +7 (812) 310-4631 All the contact addresses above are open for your questions, opinions, critics and recommendations. Any responses would be greatly appreciated. ================================================================= END OF DOCUMENT =================================================================