GENERAL

The pc-mail software provides a single user with  facilities  for
creating,  sending and receiving electronic mail messages via the
uucp network. The programs were developed under UNIX but also run
with MS-DOS. Porting to other OSes should be relatively easy.

For the non-technical user there is a menu-driven shell that  au-
tomatically  invokes  various utility programs, e.g. an editor of
the user's choice for editing or  creating  messages,  a  program
that logs in on a UNIX host to exchange files and so on. Any edi-
tor that produces clean ASCII files can be used  (wordstar  files
are  also handled correctly).  Other facilities: alias data base,
batch-mode operation.

More technically oriented users will want to avoid  the  interac-
tive  shell  and  use  the  mail  data  base and utility programs
directly. The necessary information can be found in the implemen-
tation  documentation. In adition, almost every source file has a
built-in manual page.  The  latter  can  be  extracted  with  the
srctoman.sh shell script.

The programs have been tested under MS-DOS on XT  and  AT  clones
(MicroSoft  V4  C compiler), and with Microport System-V. For the
interactive shell, a tiny MS-DOS termcap library is provided.  It
requires the ANSI.SYS tty driver (or better) to work sucessfully.
In order to run the software under UNIX  (for  testing  purposes)
one  needs  a  C  library  with  the  System-V  library functions
(strtok(), memcpy() et  al.).  Morever,  the  directory  scanning
functions  only work with file systems that use fixed-size direc-
tory entries (i.e. not BSD).

The programs support the sending and receiving of electronic mail
only;  no  transfer  of  files by name and no message routing. In
fact the pc side treats each data file it receives as a mail mes-
sage,  irrespective  of  its  actual  destination. The reason for
these limitations are (besides uucp security problems)  that  all
files  can be sent as mail, and that a pc does not provide multi-
user support anyway.

You can do anything with the source, but not ask money for it nor
remove  references to the original authors. Complaints, feedback,
suggestions are welcome.

	Wietse Venema	uucp:	mcvax!eutrc3!wswietse
			bitnet:	wswietse@heitue5
