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. Sources will be submitted to one of the comp.sources
newsgroups.

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 and the .man files.

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.

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 files
can always be sent as mail, and that a pc does not provide multi-
user support anyway.

Complaints, feedback, suggestions are welcome.

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