
                               CrashEcho

                      Your echomail crash-helmet!

  0. Introduction
  ---------------

Welcome to CrashEcho - successor of a wellknown CrashMail II tosser by
Johan Billing.

CrashMail users will probably find some things familiar while some
features are gone such as netmail routing and 5D addressing (for reasons
of ideology!), but there's a lot of new features, like amiga-style
outbound, carbon copies (a-la FastEcho), ability to retoss BAD area and
of course a lot of bugfixes. See ChangeLog for more information.

For suggestions, bug reports and questions, don't hesitate to contact
me:

 Sir Raorn

 ViwaNet: 963:1/64
 BasicNet: 777:5020/64
 FIDOnet: 2:5020/1437.4
 E-mail: raorn@binec.ru
 newsgroups: fido7.ru.echoprocessors, fido7.ru.unix.ftn

(,  ,     :-)

 1. Acknowledgements
 -------------------

Many thanks to Bjorn Stenberg for creating the excellent subroutine
library JAMLIB which CrashEcho uses for handling JAM messagebases.

Thanks for Johan Billing for his permission to fork CrashEcho from
CrashMail II.

Thanx to Alexander S. Aganichev <asa@users.sourceforge.net> for win32
port.

Special thanks to Alexander N. Osmolovsky (FIDOnet: 2:5020/2020.20)
for great betatesting and bug reporting.

 2. Documentation
 ----------------

There's no other documentation, except manpages and well commented
crashecho.conf file.

 3. Items that need to be discussed
 ----------------------------------

  3.0 Availability
  ----------------

http://hell.binec.ru/crashecho/ - official CrashEcho page.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/crashecho/ - Crashecho at FreshMeat.
ftp://hell.binec.ru/pub/ftn/crashecho/ - public ftp.

  3.1 Platforms
  -------------

This version of CrashEcho can be compiled for Linux and FreeBSD (tested
on 4.x-STABLE). There was some rumours about Net- and OpenBSD :-)

Win32 port made by Alexander S. Aganichev <asa@users.sourceforge.net>
and now officialy supported by Author (me :-).

If you are interested in running CrashEcho on another platform, please
contact me if you are willing to do the work necessary to adapt
CrashEcho to your platform. The amount of work required mostly depends
on whether your compiler and C library supports some common
POSIX-functions which CrashEcho uses.

  3.2 Paths
  ---------

Don't use the ~ character in paths. Such paths are expanded to point to
your home directory by the shell and not by the I/O functions in the
system. They will not work in CrashEcho.

You should always use absolute paths in configuration file, otherwise
CrashEcho will fail to unpack incoming bundles. If you used relative
paths, CrashEcho will also use relative paths in flow files which might
confuse your mailer.

Under Win32 you should escape backslashes in paths. E.g. "D:\FTN\INBOUND"
sould appear in config file like "D:\\FTN\\INBOUND".

  3.3 Outbound
  ------------

CrashEcho can use a 4D Bink-style outbound or Amiga-style outbound. 5D
outbound no longer supported.

  3.4 Messagebase formats
  -----------------------

CrashEcho currently can use *.msg messagebase and JAM messagebases.

Some notes on the different messagebase formats:

 *.msg

  *.msg is the most basic format for FTN messages. It is specified in
  FTS-0001 and most FTN programs can handle this. There are however some
  variations. There are Zone and Point fields in the message header, but
  since some programs use them for other purposes, CrashEcho doesn't
  read them. This means that CrashEcho won't work if your reader doesn't
  create INTL, TOPT and FMPT kludge lines. Most readers do so this
  probably won't be a problem.

  In *.msg areas, make sure that all files are named *.msg and not
  *.MSG! If they are not named in lowercase, CrashEcho will not process
  them.

 JAM

  JAM is a newer messageformat which while not perfect at least is much
  better than *.msg. It provides reply-linking, but unfortunately not
  between areas. JAM has a few odd features which CrashEcho does not
  support. CrashEcho does not support messages with multiple recipients
  and handles only one attached file/file request per message.

  If you wish to use JAM messagebases, you will need JAMlib library
  written by Bjorn Stenberg and patched by Johan Billing and me.
  Autoconf/automake/libtool version of JAMlib available at CrashEcho's
  page.

  3.5 Highwater marks
  -------------------

CrashEcho can use highwater marks to speed up the exporting of
messages. The highwater mark is only the number of the highest exported
message in an area. If you decide to use highwater marks, CrashEcho
will only export messages with a message number that is higher that the
old highwater mark. If you want to export messages with a lower number
than the highwater mark, you have to force CrashEcho to scan the whole
area by deleting the file where the highwater mark is stored. In *.msg
areas the highwater mark is stored in the first message of the area
(1.msg) and in JAM areas it is stored in the <basename>.cmhw file, like
CrashMail does. (Also note that this is why the first message in a *.msg
area never is exported.)

  3.6 Patterns
  ------------

CrashEcho uses fnmatch(3) for pattern matching. See appropriate manpage
for more information.

 4. Copyright
 ------------

The original version of CrashMail is copyright Johan Billing 1999.
Except where explicitly stated otherwise, all additions and improvements
are copyright Sir Raorn 2000, 2001, 2002.

Permission to use, copy and distribute CrashEcho is granted provided
that this copyright notice is included. Permission to modify CrashEcho
is granted. Distributing modified versions of CrashEcho is allowed
provided that the documentation clearly states that it is a modified
version. Parts of CrashEcho may be freely used in other projects as long
as the documentation mentions the original copyright holders.

GNU getopt and fnmatch interface distributed under terms of GNU Lesser
General Public License version 2.1. See COPYING.LIB.

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