******* THE I-MAIL MESSAGER ******* (c) Copyright - Challenge Business Systems Burnaby, B.C. Canada March, 1995 All Rights Reserved IMPORTANT SYSOP INFORMATION ******* THE I-MAIL MESSAGER ******* SYSOP INFORMATION There are several keys points for you, as the sysop that you should be aware of regarding this program . We want you to have this information as a reference because we think its important that sysops know as much as possible about any program running on their BBS. The Key Points: 1) The differences between the 4.01 and 4.10 version is minor and only affects writing messages but WCCODE 4.10 does contain 1 bug fix in this area so we incorporated it. Uploading attached files in "Write Messages" from a wccode application does NOT work in 4.01. This was fixed in 4.10. Therefore there are changes in a help screen that remove the warning not to use it if you install the 4.10 version. Also, users of the 4.10 version will NOT be asked if they wish to upload a file to attach to the message when first selecting "Write Message". 2) Using Wildcat temporary directories with WCCODE (both versions). If your node batch startup files don't contain a SET TEMP= statement then WCCODE is going to look for a directory called TEMP in the node's home work directory (i.e. C:\WILDCAT\WCWORK\NODE1\TEMP) and create this directory if it doesn't exist. If you don't want this to happen then you must tell WCCODE what temporary directory to use for temp. files the program and user creates. WARNING - Do NOT use the same SET TEMP= statement such as SET TEMP=C:\TEMP for all your nodes. The program uses the same file names for all users on at the same time (so does Wildcat). This will cause errors on message text file uploads and new messages. 3) All user's names and address are placed in individual datafiles in the same directory as the IMAIL program. The naming system for these files are unique to each user based on their user id number assigned to them by the BBS. Example - User 101 on the BBS would be assigned a datafile called IM000101.DAT where IM stands for the IMAIL program, .DAT is the file extension for datafile and 101 is their Wildcat User Id Number, leading 0's are placed after the IM and in from of the id number, if necessary to ensure the file name is always a length of 12 characters. The first time a user enters the program their datafile is created automatically for them. 4) All user's e-mail message taglines are placed in the same directory as the IMAIL program as well. The file naming system is the same as the datafiles except for the extension. Instead of .DAT all tagline data- files are assigned the extension .TAG. Tagline datafiles are not automatically created. The file will only exist if the specific user creates a tagline (why create needless files). 5) This program will NOT allow any user who does not have full join, read and write access to your Internet E-Mail conference into the program. If you receive complaints from certain users that they can not access The I-Mail Messager this will probably be the reason. ******* THE I-MAIL MESSAGER ******* SYSOP INFORMATION (Cont.) If a user is stopped from entering the program for this reason they will have an error message displayed on their screen stating that they don't have conference rights. A note will be written to the activity log of the node they were on informing you of their attempted access. 6) All activity such as entering The I-mail Messager and program errors are written to the appropriate node's activity log for your review. This includes the date & time plus a description of the error, if any. 7) This program reads the following Wildcat data files. A) Allusers.dat - The User Database B) Confdesc.dat - The Conference Database C) Makewild.dat - The Main Wildcat Configuration File D) Messages.dat - The Message Header Database E) Security.dat - The User's Security Level Database F) Nodeinfo.dat - The User's Node File 8) This program writes to the following Wildcat data files. 1) Allusers.dat - The User Database 2) Messages.dat - The Message Header Database 3) Activity.??? - The Node's Activity Log File (??? being replaced with the node Number) 9) What is written to the datafiles. The following fields are changed during the use of the program if the user actually writes messages, downloads a message or downloads their name and address list. A) The Users Database (ALLUSERS.DAT) 1) The Messages Written count is increased by 1 each time a message is written (and actually saved). 2) If you are charging messages downloads to the user's Upload/ Download Ratio (see IMSYSOP.DOC) The Download Kbytes Field is increased (+)IK and the Download Files Total is increased by (+)1 upon a successful message download. or (+)2K & +(1) if they download their name and address list. These file sizes are set by the program and can not be changed. This was done because you can determine a file size from within a WCCODE program. B) The Messages Header Database (MSG?????.DAT) The actual name of this file is MSG plus the your Internet conference number. It is located in your Internet Mail directory. New records are added to this file for every message written so all relevant fields are updated. See Item 8 for further changes to this file when deletions are made. ******* THE I-MAIL MESSAGER ******* SYSOP INFORMATION (Cont.) 10) If a user elects to delete a message that has a file attached to it the file will be deleted from your Internet E-mail attach directory upon the user confirming the deletion. The Messager header will have both the internal and external files names erased as well. While we still show the user their deleted messages on the screen (flagged with a "D" in Red) the attached file must be deleted when the user confirms the deletion. This is because Wildcat does not remove the attached file when you run Wcpack or Wcrepair. This conforms to what happens when the user selects Wildcat's Delete Message. (You can confirm this easily enough if you wish.) WARNING: A) Should a problem arise with any of the datafiles listed above in 5 & 6 The I-Mail Messager will not function properly (and probably the rest of your BBS too). B) Strange things can happen if your user's database and/or the messages database index files become corrupted. This includes putting the wrong user-id number in the message header. If that happens WCGATE will put the wrong e-mail return name on the message when it exports it to FXUUCIO. This will get your users quite upset when people they know, get personal (confidential?) e-mail from persons the reader has never heard of. Also the writer won't be able see or read their own messages. Should your BBS suffer a system crash be sure to run the Wildcat Utility Wcrepair and re-build these index files. 11) Our "In-House" testing has shown that the regular (daily?) use of WcPack or WcRepair to remove deleted messages and re-index your message conferences greatly enhances the overall performance of The I-Mail Messager. *********** END OF INFORMATION **********