User Manual for
Q-Blue, release 2.4

an offline electronic mail reader
for Amiga computers, by Paul Kienitz

Freeware distribution license:

How this manual is formatted

The original manual was formatted to be printed on paper from an Amiga.  Its only text formatting was underlining. In this HTML version, underlining is still used for emphasis. Text seen on screen in Q-Blue’s user interface is shown in bold sans, and filenames and keystrokes are given in plain boldface.  (The original just used quotation marks in these cases; they are retained in some cases where they aid clarity.)  Samples of message content, and of text or code entered by the user, are shown in monospace on white.  Several minor corrections have been made, and the section on contacting the author has been replaced with up-to-date information.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1) BACKGROUND

1.1) So, what is an offline mail reader anyway?

If you have used offline mail readers in the past, or are familiar with the concept in some other way, you probably don’t need to read this section. For those who are not familiar with them, here is an explanation of what Q-Blue is for:

Its purpose is for reading electronic mail from computer bulletin board systems, or BBSes as they are commonly called, without tying up your telephone line while doing so. If you don’t have an Amiga computer with a modem, or don’t use it to call BBSes or other online data services, you don’t have any use for Q-Blue. If the BBSes you call do not support offline readers, you’re still out of luck. But quite a few BBSes have the ability to package mail in QWK format, and an increasing number are supporting the more sophisticated Blue Wave format. If a BBS has a lot of message traffic and has no means of allowing callers to read mail offline, then it’s time to pester the person in charge (the sysop) until she or he adds that ability.

Typically, offline mail packets are created by means of something called a “door”: a piece of software that callers to the BBS can use by giving a command to some BBS menu. In some cases, the BBS itself has a built-in feature for creating them, without using a separate program. The details are different for each individual BBS. We will refer to the software that bundles offline mail packets as the “mail door”, in either case. Once the mail door is running, it will provide a menu of commands which allow you to select which mail you want to read, and how to package it. Again, the details vary from one setup to another — the various mail doors all differ in their command interfaces. Once the mail is bundled up, the door lets you download it all as a single compressed file. Then you can log off from the BBS, hang up the phone, and read the mail at your leisure with an offline reader. The reader allows you to write new electronic mail messages, including replies to the ones you have downloaded. When your replies (if any) are ready, you can call the BBS again and upload them to the mail door, which will then “post” the messages in the correct places.

Why bother with these extra steps to read your mail? Because if you don’t, then your phone line is busy the whole time you read and reply to messages. If the call is not local, the costs can add up rapidly. The BBS’s phone line is also busy, preventing other people from using it if it does not have other lines available. Also, when reading online you have to create your replies using whatever excuse for a text editor the BBS provides; not only are you deprived of the features of your preferred editor, but different BBS systems are not consistent with each other in how their editors work. And when reading messages, you have to put up with the slowness of text sent through modems, and possibly line noise as well. When reading mail offline, there is no line noise, no speed bottleneck, and you can use your favorite text editor to write replies and new messages. It also saves quite a bit of money if you call BBSes long distance. This is what Q-Blue is for: it unpacks the mail packet you downloaded, displays the messages, and lets you write replies.

Q-Blue 2.4 has the following arbitrary limitations: no message may be longer than 8000 lines or the remainder will be discarded. Up to 200 replies may be created in one upload packet. The personal messages area can contain at most 400 messages. There will be at most 50 bulletins and other extra text files shown. The downloads and uploads directories can have at most 400 files between them or the file list window may leave some out. Up to 32000 messages per area can be handled, in up to 32000 areas. The maximum number of taglines that can be listed is also 32000. Attachment of more than one file to a message is not supported.

1.2) What are “QWK” and “Blue Wave”?

Whenever a BBS creates a bundle of information to be used by an offline reader, it stores the data in a particular format which the offline reader understands. The data is contained in a “packet”, which is a compressed archive containing several files. The software that creates the offline mail packets (commonly called the “door”) and the software that lets you read the packets (the “reader”) must agree on all the details of what these files contain. Unfortunately, there are different kinds of doors which have their own incompatible standards in this area, each with its own set of readers which can understand its format but not others. Q-Blue is a reader that understands two mail formats.

“QWK” (which is pronounced “quack” by those who prefer other formats) is the common name for the format of files that are produced by an offline mail door called QMail, and a great many others that are compatible with it, such as RoseMail, TomCat, DLGQWK, and so on. The format was created by Mark “Sparky” Herring of Sparkware, the author of QMail and several related products. The name comes from the fact that the files it creates are typically given a name that ends with “.QWK”. The majority of mail doors are compatible with QMail and produce message bundles of this type. The format of QWK files is public knowledge, and new mail processing software using this format is being created all the time. It is obsolete, but still very popular because, until recently, there were few alternatives.

“Blue Wave” is a different format for offline mail, which the doors and readers based on QWK format are not compatible with. It has several advantages: for instance, it is designed to be able to send private “Netmail” messages between different BBSes linked by networks such as FidoNet, and it allows one to specify, while offline, things like the criteria by which the door should select mail for future downloads. Blue Wave also avoids the shortcomings of the QWK format which cause the subject lines of messages to be shortened to 25 characters and, in many cases, cause peoples’ names to appear in all uppercase letters.

There are two main subtypes of Blue Wave mail packets, known as “version 2” and “version 3”. The latter has improved features, such as direct support for Internet mail and newsgroup posts. There are several circumstances in which Q-Blue will behave differently depending on whether a Blue Wave mail packet is version 2 or version 3, documented throughout this manual.

The main disadvantage of Blue Wave is that originally, software using it was available from only one source — George Hatchew of Cutting Edge Computing, formerly known as Blue Wave Software — and because of this, it is not nearly as widespread or broadly supported as the older QWK format is, though it has gained ground rapidly. The version 2 Blue Wave format was designed by George Hatchew and Fred Rappuhn. The first Blue Wave compatible software from another source (Q-Blue 0.7) did not appear until mid-1992, and the Blue Wave format specification was not made public until the end of 1993. By this time Fred Rappuhn was out of the picture, and version 3 Blue Wave is George Hatchew’s creation.

The one other widespread format for offline mail is called “Silver Xpress” — it’s as old a format as QWK, and yet over the years it has grown possibly more sophisticated than Blue Wave. Q-Blue does not support Silver Xpress, because the format is proprietary and its creator, Hector Santos of Santronics Software, has chosen to support another program for reading Silver Xpress mail on the Amiga. Instead of making the Silver Xpress format available to the public, Santronics instead set out to develop a new format called “XNet”. Unfortunately, XNet never came into real use.

Other completely unrelated formats are being used to read mail from the other big online services and from the Internet, which at this time are still largely a separate world from BBS mail — though less so than previously. “SOUP” is probably the most popular such format at this time. It is used principally for Usenet newsgroups. And there are other readers which understand messages in the forms used by FidoNet compatible mailers to transmit mail between networked BBSes, or store BBS message bases. Q-Blue does not understand any of these other formats yet. It does understand QWK and Blue Wave. It can read messages produced by any door compatible with either of these, and create replies that they can understand.

1.3) General information about Q-Blue’s interface

Q-Blue’s user interface is mostly similar to what you would expect in any modern Amiga program, but not entirely. When you use an eight color screen (section 6.2 describes how you can choose between four and eight colors), all areas of the screen that are meant to be clicked on with the left mouse button, except scroller gadgets, are given a distinctive color — green in the default palette. Rectangular green areas with a “raised” border and a word inside are command buttons. Clicking while the pointer is over that area instructs Q-Blue to carry out some action. A somewhat larger rectangle with a curled arrow at the left end is a “cycle gadget”. This lets you select one of several options. Every time you click on this gadget, a different option is selected and a different word is displayed inside. If you click it enough times you will get back to the option you started with and the cycle will repeat. Clicking it with the shift key held down causes the options to appear in reverse order. In a very few cases, Q-Blue will instead use “radio buttons”: a set of several small oval buttons of which just one appears recessed and has a bright dot in the middle. Selecting the one labeled with the desired option “pops out” any other that is selected.

Another kind of gadget is a small green rectangle with a “raised” border containing either a checkmark or a blank space. This represents an option that can be turned either on or off. If the checkmark is present, the option is turned on. Clicking on such a gadget removes the checkmark if it is present, and makes it appear if it is absent.

Command button gadgets have a word inside with an underline under one letter of the word, usually the first. This means that if you type that letter on the keyboard, the effect will be as if you had clicked on the gadget — the same command will be carried out. In the case of cycle gadgets and checkmark gadgets, there is a label written next to the gadget, and the first letter of that label is underlined. Typing that letter on the keyboard is the same as clicking on the gadget. A checkmark gadget will switch from off to on or vice versa, and a cycle gadget will switch to its next setting. Or if you hold down a shift key while typing the letter, it will switch to its previous setting. Sometimes a command button will have a bent arrow next to it shaped like the one on your return key, pointing down and then to the left. This indicates that pressing the return key, or the Enter key on the numeric keypad, is equivalent to clicking that gadget.

String gadgets are long green strips with a “ridge” border. Q-Blue’s string gadgets have some unusual added properties not shared with most other Amiga software. They are discussed in the next section (1.4).

Commands can also be given with pull-down menus by using the right mouse button. Each menu item that causes a dialog window to open has a name with “...” shown on the end. Each item’s corresponding keyboard command is displayed along the right edge of the menu. For instance, the item that reads “Open packet...   O” can be executed by typing the letter O on the keyboard as well as by selecting the menu item, and it will open a window. All menu choices are visible, even when they are not usable. The unusable ones are “ghosted” — that is, they are written in gray-looking speckled letters instead of in clear dark text. Selecting a ghosted item has no effect. Gadgets can be ghosted too, when they are not usable. A ghosted gadget is speckled with background color so that it looks blurred and dimmed.

Sometimes the mouse pointer gets turned into an image of a pocket watch — or under AmigaDOS 3.x, the system “busy pointer” you specify. This indicates that Q-Blue is busy on something that can’t be interrupted, and you have to wait a moment. When the mouse pointer is shown this way, anything you do with the mouse or keyboard will be ignored. The exception is when a requester with option gadgets is visible in the middle of the screen. If you activate the backdrop behind the requester, the watch image will show, but any input you give will be heard by the requester.

Any window can, of course, be closed by clicking the left mouse button on the little box in the upper left corner — the “close gadget”. Pressing the Esc key has the same effect. It is a keyboard synonym for the close gadget, for all of Q-Blue’s windows. But in a few cases, the window might not close when you tell it to. Sometimes, if you enter invalid information, you will get an error message when you try to close the window, and you have to correct the indicated problem to be able to close the window. The number of windows that act this way has been kept to a minimum.

Sometimes Q-Blue needs you to specify the name and location of a file. In these cases it will display the standard “ASL” file requester. A description of how to use this requester is covered in the basic manuals that come with every Amiga, and most users are familiar with its usage. The file asl.library must be present in your system’s LIBS: directory for this to work. If the library cannot be opened, Q-Blue opens a small window with one string gadget into which you can type the name of the file you want to specify. Pressing return closes the window, telling Q-Blue to go ahead and use the file you’ve named. Clicking the close gadget or pressing Esc tells Q-Blue not to use what you’ve entered.

1.4) Special properties of Q-Blue’s string gadgets

Q-Blue’s string gadgets are like any Amiga string gadget in that each contains a line of text (which may be empty) that you can edit by clicking in the gadget to “activate” it, and typing new text or erasing old text with the backspace and Del keys. Holding down the right Amiga key (just to the right of the space bar) and typing the letter X erases everything in the string gadget, if it is active. (A string gadget becomes “active” when you click the mouse in it. A cursor appears in it to mark where the stuff you type will be entered.) Pressing backspace with the shift key held down erases everything from the cursor to the beginning of the string, and the Del key, with shift down, erases everything from the cursor to the end. Holding down the right Amiga key and typing Q restores the string to whatever it showed when you first activated it, undoing any changes you made.

When Q-Blue is using an eight color screen, string gadgets are colored green inside like all the other gadgets. When the gadget is activated, the inside changes to black. On a four color screen, the inside is blue when it’s not activated, like the background of the window the gadget appears in. If another program, or an ASL requester, creates a string gadget on Q-Blue’s screen, it is typically black inside even when not active. Of course, these colors refer to the default palette settings. The special properties discussed here do not apply to those windows — they only apply to windows created by Q-Blue itself. The keystrokes described above, however, are standard for all.

Q-Blue does not supply special keyboard shortcuts for activating each string gadget, as it does for each gadget of the other kinds. Instead, the tab key is used as a universal string gadget activator. Whenever any string gadgets are visible, pressing the tab key will activate one of them. Pressing tab again will deactivate that one and activate the next one below it. Pressing tab with a shift key held down activates the next one above. Pressing either enough times will bring you back to the gadget that was originally active. And this is not the only way to activate other string gadgets.

Normally, when you are finished editing a string gadget, you press return. If there is another string gadget below the one you pressed return in, it will be activated — unless, that is, you turn off this feature in the Options setup window. This does not “wrap around”; that is, the first gadget will not activate when you press return in the last one. If you do not want the next gadget to be activated, hold down an Alt key while pressing return. If you want the gadget above to be activated, hold down a shift key while pressing return. The last gadget is activated if you use shift-return in the first one. But if the Next string gad activates option is turned off (see section 6.3), no other gadget is activated. Of course, none of this applies to windows that contain only one string gadget.

As mentioned in the previous section, the Esc key acts as a synonym for the “close gadget” in the upper left corner of each window. This even works while a string gadget is active; if you press Esc while typing into a string gadget, the window containing the gadget will be closed.

Q-Blue’s string gadgets have one other unusual property (which is standard in some other graphical operating systems): you can paste from the system clipboard into any string gadget in Q-Blue’s windows. This is done by typing the letter V with the right Amiga key held down — the standard “paste” keystroke used in most programs that use the clipboard. When this keystroke is used in an active string gadget, and the system clipboard (unit 0) contains text, the contents of the string gadget are replaced with that text, or as much of it as will fit. The gadget is briefly deactivated but normally becomes active again an instant later. Except when that reactivation fails, using right-Amiga-Q to “undo” its contents will restore what was there before the clipboard paste. This feature has many uses when combined with the feature for drag-selecting text from messages into the clipboard: you can copy a user name or network address into the message writing window, copy a filename into the download requests window, steal taglines, and so on. This can sometimes also be used to enter strange characters that can’t be typed in from the keyboard.

If the clipboard contains more than one line of text, then normally newlines are converted to spaces, and any spaces after the newline are removed. But in certain string gadgets that use “@”-codes, newlines are replaced with the code sequence @N, which is translated back into a newline when the string is used. The gadgets that use @N are the editor command strings (see section 5.3), the compressor command strings (section 4.2), and the quote header, the carbon copy header, the signature (section 6.5), and their BBS Local equivalents (section 6.8).

1.5) Q-Blue’s question and error requesters

Q-Blue uses simple requesters whenever it needs to ask the user a question, or report an important message. These requesters are red in the default eight color palette, centered in the middle of the screen, and have mouse gadgets along the bottom for you to respond with. These are used instead of the standard “system requesters” because they have clearer keyboard shortcuts. For giving error messages or other information that does not ask you to make a choice, there will be one gadget in the lower right corner under the text of the message, labeled Okay. For cases when you have to make a choice, there will be two or three gadgets, each labeled with a different word. The first letter of each label word is underlined to indicate a keyboard shortcut you can use.

One of the gadgets has a bent arrow showing next to it, to indicate that pressing return is equivalent to selecting that gadget. The gadget with the arrow next to it is considered the default choice. The space bar, as well as the return key and the Enter key on the numeric keypad, will select this default choice. If the requester has a Cancel option in the rightmost gadget, pressing the Esc key will make that choice. Esc is used to mean “cancel” or “close window” throughout Q-Blue. If there is no Cancel gadget, then pressing Esc makes the default choice, like the return key. The text above the gadgets explains the choice you have to make.

While one of these requesters is open, the rest of Q-Blue cannot do anything. If you activate some other Q-Blue window, the mouse pointer will show as a “busy” clock face. You must choose one of the gadgets before the program can resume operation, either with the mouse or with a keyboard equivalent.

If a requester cannot be opened, for instance because all chip memory has been used up, Q-Blue’s screen title bar will turn bright red and display the message

*** ERROR ***  NO MEMORY!! Other errors likely. PRESS ANY KEY

If this happens, you should probably assume that there have been other errors which it could not report to you in detail. You should probably do something to increase the available memory in your Amiga, like quitting some other program that you have running, or there may be a risk of a system crash (hopefully not from Q-Blue itself). Like the message says, you then need to press a key to allow Q-Blue to continue.

1.6) A brief description of Q-Blue’s “list windows”

Q-Blue uses something called a “list window” in many different ways. These windows are used much like standard “listview gadgets”, such as the scrollable lists seen in a file or font requester. They show a sequence of lines, which can be scrolled up and down using a proportional gadget at the right edge. One line is “highlighted” — the text is written on a different background color than the one used in the rest of the window. In the default palette, most lines have a blue background but the highlighted one (the current selection) has a green background, so you see a green stripe across the window. Various keystrokes, or a mouse click, can be used to select any line in the list as the highlighted one.

A scrolling list window appears whenever you choose a mail file to unpack, or choose a message area to read or post a message in, or choose a message to read within an area, or choose a tagline. This list window works the same in all cases... mostly.

Everything can be done with either the keyboard or the mouse. With the mouse, you can highlight a line by clicking on it with the left button, and if you double-click on a line, the window is closed and that line is taken as your final selection. If there are more lines than the window has room for, you can use the scroll gadget at the right edge to move more lines into the visible area. If you don’t want to make any selection, click the close gadget in the upper left corner, and it will close the window and behave as if you had never opened it — anything you did to move the highlighted line will be ignored.

Keyboard control is mostly done with arrow keys. Pressing the up or down arrow key moves the highlighted bar up or down by one line, and you can also move the highlight line up or down by a “page” (as many lines as show in the window, minus one) by pressing an up or down arrow key with an Alt key held down, or by pressing the PgUp and PgDn keys on the numeric keypad. You can jump to the first or last line with the Home and End numeric pad keys, or pressing an up or down arrow key with the Ctrl key held down.

Pressing return or the space bar closes the window, selecting the line that is highlighted at the time as your final choice. The Enter key on the numeric pad also works. To close the window and have Q-Blue behave as if it had not been opened, press the Esc key. In other words, pressing the return key can be thought of as “okay”, and pressing Esc can be thought of as “cancel”. The same distinction applies to double-clicking a line vs. clicking the close gadget. A common mistake, perhaps most often made with the window for selecting what area to post a message in, is to select a different line and then click the close gadget instead of pressing return or double-clicking. This causes your selection to be ignored.

The list window need not be the active window — if any window on Q-Blue’s screen is active (except the Packer command output console window, an ASL requester, or something opened by another program), these keys will work.

2) AN OVERVIEW OF HOW TO USE Q-BLUE

2.1) Installation and configuration

Q-Blue 2.4 should be usable on just about any Amiga computer with at least one megabyte of memory and AmigaDOS version 2.04 or newer. Anyone still running AmigaDOS 1.3 or 1.2 can use Q-Blue 1.0, which is the last version that still works on those systems. Q-Blue is even usable on systems without a hard disk.

Before it is possible to use Q-Blue, you have to configure various settings. Most importantly, you have to set aside a couple of disk directories for use by the program, which are not used by anything else (see section 3.5). If you want to write replies, rather than just reading, you have to tell it how to use your text editor (it is set up to use C:Ed by default). There are other things to set up as well, but these are the most essential. The configuration steps are the least intuitive part of using the program, and are covered in detail in sections 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this manual.

You may also wish to install some IBM style fonts for Q-Blue to use, since the IBM character set, rather than the 8 bit ISO set normally used by the Amiga, is standard in most of the BBS world. Four such fonts are included with the Q-Blue package, along with three non-IBM fonts. The script called Install will unpack and install whichever fonts you select. If you double-click on this icon, it will put up a series of requesters that ask you which fonts you want to use, and where to put them. It first asks you whether you want to select a special place to install them, instead of the normal FONTS: directory. If you select Yes, it presents you with an ASL file requester to allow you to pick another directory.

The script describes each font in turn, mentioning what screen types it’s intended for, asking you whether you want to install it. The available fonts are in two groups: some using the IBM character set that is commonly used with BBS mail, and some using the ISO character set that is used by normal Amiga fonts. Each set has a selection of fonts suitable for different screen resolutions. It goes through the IBM fonts first and the ISO fonts last.

The four IBM fonts are: newcleanibm size 8, which is 8 pixels wide and suitable for a basic noninterlaced NTSC or PAL screen; tallibm size 11, 12, and 14, which is also 8 pixels wide and suitable for interlaced or productivity screens 400 or more pixels tall; wideibm size 9, 12, and 14, which is 10 pixels wide and useful only with screen modes 800 pixels wide, which older Amigas cannot display; and stretchibm size 12, which is 9 pixels wide and useful only for NTSC or PAL screens which use extreme horizontal overscan to achieve a width of 720 pixels.

The ISO fonts are exact equivalents in size and appearance to the IBM fonts, and include talliso 11, 12, and 14, wideiso 12 and 14, and stretchiso 12. There is no newcleaniso 8 or wideiso 9 because the Amiga’s built-in fonts topaz 8 and topaz 9 fill these roles. Either font type can be used if the mail you read is all basic 7-bit ASCII. These fonts are generally all similar in appearance, with a look much like that of an old version of topaz 11 that was included with AmigaDOS 1.3. They are not sans-serif like the modern topaz fonts, except for the 8 point newcleanibm font.

The Install icon runs a script using IconX, so various standard commands such as Copy must be available in your C: directory. You can, if desired, install the fonts manually with a suitable command in a CLI (AmigaShell) window, or by using a directory utility program. To do it with a CLI command, CD to the directory the Q-Blue archive was unpacked into, and give a command such as “Copy fonts/#? ALL FONTS:”.

If you have already installed the newcleanibm and tallibm fonts from a version of Q-Blue earlier than 2.3, you should go ahead and install the new versions, replacing them. Numerous small improvements have been made in the fonts. The wideibm and stretchibm fonts may be useful to you if you intend to use Q-Blue with higher than normal horizontal resolution, but if not, you may have little reason to unpack them. These fonts can also be of use in terminal programs when calling BBSes.

In the downloadable version currently distributed, the Install script does not do much more than install the fonts. It can also install a text file called Taglines which can be used with Q-Blue’s tagline function, to a directory you select. To install the program itself, you would simply drag its icon to whatever directory you want to keep it in. The same goes for this manual, Q-Blue.doc.

Once the installation and internal setup is complete, you can use Q-Blue to read mail. A broad outline of how to do this is given in the following sections, 2.2 through 2.6.

2.2) Downloading a mail packet to read

To use Q-Blue, you first need some mail to read. To get it, log on to a BBS that has messages you want to read, using your modem and telecommunications software as you normally would. Then, use whatever command the BBS provides to create QWK or Blue Wave mail packets. Often, this is a command for starting up a separate “door” program within the BBS system. (This manual will use the term “door” generically to refer to offline mail packing systems, even when they are a built-in feature of the BBS.) Optionally, give commands to the door program to select what mail you want to read. Usually you would just give a simple command that means, “Send me all new messages that I have not read yet, in the areas I’ve been reading.” The door will pack the mail into a file using some archiving program such as Zip or LHA, and then let you download that file by some protocol such as ZModem.

QWK compatible doors vary greatly, and this manual can’t begin to describe how to operate all of the different ones that exist. But Blue Wave doors are quite consistent between different BBSes.

One note about QWK doors: some offer an option to send packets that do not include “.NDX” files. You may use this option with Q-Blue, as those files are usually redundant and Q-Blue can get along fine without them. Many other QWK readers require them.

If you find that you need to re-download some mail that the mail door thinks you have already read, such as if a packet is accidentally deleted, see the discussion of “pointer files” in section 8.3. Q-Blue saves copies of these files from the packets you read, when a BBS provides them.

2.3) Starting Q-Blue and opening a packet

After the mail packet has been downloaded into your Amiga, log off of the BBS and start up Q-Blue. Either double-click its Workbench icon, or just type Q-Blue to a command prompt in a CLI window. When started with a CLI command, it automatically detaches itself to run in the background, so that you get your command prompt back right away. If the program is not located in a directory included in your command path, you may have to type the program name with a directory path in front of it.

When starting Q-Blue, you can specify a mail packet to open, either on the command line, by shift-double-clicking the packet when starting from Workbench, or with a “tool type” line in the Workbench icon. Details on this are in section 3.1, which also describes how to specify an alternate configuration file to change Q-Blue’s option settings.

If you do not use this option, Q-Blue will present you with a mostly blank custom screen, with seven gadgets at the bottom, the leftmost one of which is labeled Open. (Unless, that is, you use a setup option to remove these gadgets.) To open a mail packet, you can either click on this gadget with the left mouse button, or press the letter O on the keyboard, or use the right mouse button to select the Open packet option from the Packet menu. These are all equivalent ways of giving an “Open” command. This is the leftmost of four menus, the other three being Messages, Replies, and Setup. The gadgets at the bottom are mostly just shortcuts for menu items.

The result of selecting Open will be that Q-Blue will display a window labeled “Select file to unpack -- enter or double-click”, showing a list of files in the directory that your downloads are kept in. This is a list window of the type described in section 1.6. Telling Q-Blue which directory your packets are downloaded into is part of the setup process, and is covered in section 3.4.

The mail packet you just downloaded will typically be the first file listed in this window; others are listed in order of increasing age. The first file shown is highlighted. You can select this (or another) file as described in section 1.6, for instance by pressing return. Q-Blue will then attempt to unpack the file for reading. In most cases it will automatically figure out which of several possible decompression programs to use.

Alternatively, you can use the gadget labeled No Pkt. or the N key, which correspond to the Open (no packet) menu item. This option allows you to write messages for uploading to a BBS you have called in the past, without having any downloaded mail packet on hand to read. It works like reading a normal mail packet, except that instead of being able to read a set of messages from the BBS, there is only one blank “placeholder” message. Instead of displaying a list of mail packets, the selection window displays a list of special files, each of which describes one BBS that you have read mail packets from previously. Section 8.4 describes this fully.

2.4) Reading the messages

After showing you the operation of the decompression program in a text window labeled Packer command output, and assuming that the unpacking is successful, Q-Blue will show you a window which lists the different message areas in which messages exist. BBSes typically separate messages on different topics into distinct areas; for instance, one for messages about programming, another one for talking about movies, another for bondage fantasies, still another for sharing adventures in stamp collecting, and so on. These different areas, or “conferences” or “subs” as they are sometimes called, are listed in a window labeled “Select message area -- Enter or double-click”. It works just like the file selection window. If you want to start at the beginning, just press return.

If you want to read your own personal mail first, a special area near the top of the list, just above the first “real” area, contains copies of all messages in the packet that were addressed to you (if any). Above that there may be another special area where you can read extra text files included with the packet, such as news about the BBS, welcome and goodbye messages, updated bulletins, and perhaps a list of new files available to download. The highlight bar normally starts out on the first regular message area, which comes after the personal messages area if any. To read the personal messages or the bulletins first, use the up arrow key or double-click with the mouse on the desired line.

If you have already opened this same packet once before, the highlighted line is the area in which you were last reading when you closed the packet. This allows you to close a mail packet, reopen it later, and resume right where you left off.

After you have selected an area and this window has closed, it might, depending on the preference options you have chosen in setting up Q-Blue, show you another window listing all the messages in the selected area, showing who they are from, who they are addressed to, and the subject header of the message. The title bar of the window will show the name of the message area. Normally the highlighted line is the first one — the first message in the area. But again, if you have already opened this packet once before, then the highlighted line will be the last message that you had read in this area before closing the packet.

Now you are reading the mail. The author, addressee, subject, area, and date are shown in the box at the top of the screen (blue with a red border in the default eight color palette), and the text is shown in the large blank area in the middle. If the message is too big to fit on the screen, you can display the next screenful by pressing the space bar. You can move the message text up or down one line at a time with the arrow keys, or show the next or previous screenful with the PgUp and PgDn keys (9 and 3) on the numeric pad of your keyboard. Pressing the up and down arrow keys while holding down one of the Alt keys also does this. You can also scroll text up and down with the mouse: click it near the bottom edge of the screen and text scrolls up until you release the mouse button; click it in the box above the text and it scrolls down. By clicking and dragging the mouse in the middle you can select a section of text which is copied into the system clipboard. And if your overscan preferences allow some extra horizontal room, there will be a scroll gadget along the right edge of the screen, which can be used as another way to scroll the message text up and down. The less obvious mouse scrolling method can be used if the scroll bar does not fit into the display.

To see the next message, you can press the right arrow key, or click the gadget labeled Next at the bottom of the screen, or press the space bar when the bottom of the message text is visible on the screen. The left arrow key and the Prev. gadget make it go back to earlier messages.

When you reach the last message in the area you are reading, pressing the space bar or right arrow, or clicking the Next gadget, normally causes the Select message area window to reappear. (There is a setup option that can make it simply enter the next area, if desired.) The highlight bar is now on the next line. If you want to keep reading the messages in order, just press return or the space bar as before. You can read through all the messages in the packet just by pressing the space bar.

2.5) Writing messages and replies

At some point you may see a message you want to reply to. To do this, click the gadget at the bottom of the screen labeled Reply, or select Reply to this msg from the Replies menu, which is the third of the four menus, or press the R key. Up will pop a window labeled Writing a reply which shows who the message is from (you), who it is to (the author of the message you are replying to), and the subject line of the message (which by default is the same as the subject of the message being replied to, with Re: added in front). These are regular Amiga string gadgets which you can edit in the usual way, except that the From: gadget may be ghosted so you can’t edit it, if the message area is marked as not allowing you to use a different name. (If you are reading QWK mail, it will let you put any name in there, but the mail door may ignore it... or in some cases even discard the message!) It will try to activate the Subj.: gadget for editing when the window is opened, unless the To: gadget is blank; if you don’t like the message title that’s there you can clear it by pressing right-Amiga-X when it’s active, and then typing in a new title.

At the bottom of this window is a gadget labeled Edit, with a bent arrow next to it, shaped like the one on your return key. This arrow indicates that pressing the return key is the same as clicking the Edit button. Click it, or press the E key, or press return, and your text editing program should appear, ready to edit the text of your reply. If it doesn’t, you probably need to change something in your editor setup. See section 4 for information on getting editors to work with Q-Blue.

If you have used the Quoting feature, the message you are replying to will be shown in the editor, with (depending on your setup) “>” characters all down the left margin. You should now select the parts of the message that you want to mention in your reply, and write what you want to say in response. If you are creating the reply in a second file (this is an option you can choose during setup), then move only the parts you need to the second file; if using just one file, then erase the parts you don’t need. Then type in your response. When you’re done, tell the editor to save and close the file.

The Q-Blue display should reappear on the screen. If not, you may have to move screens around to find it. The bent arrow should now be next to the gadget marked Save instead of Edit. If not, and the gadgets in the window are ghosted, then Q-Blue is still waiting for your editor to finish. You may have to tell the editor to exit completely, to get Q-Blue to come back to life. If your editor supports ARexx or has a separate “activator” program, you should be able to leave it running continuously instead of exiting every time you finish writing a message — for details, see section 4 below on setting up the editor.

At any time during this process, you can click the Tagline gadget, and select a little one-line addendum to be tacked onto the end of the message, if you have set up a text file containing suitable lines. Or you can optionally cause this to be done automatically, without the gadget being used.

You can still adjust the various gadgets in the window, or choose Edit again if you want to make further changes to the text. When you’re satisfied, click Save or press the S or return key, and your reply will be stored and the window will close. Use the Cancel button or the letter C if you want to throw your reply away. The window’s close gadget also works.

You can also write messages that are not replies to another message. Give the Write command instead of Reply, with the gadget or the W key or the Write new message menu item, and the same window comes up, except that the subject and the name of the person it’s addressed to are blank. The process of writing the message works the same way, except you don’t start out with a quoted copy of a message you are replying to — you just write a message from scratch.

2.6) Packing and uploading your replies

When you’ve read all the messages, you need to create an upload packet containing your replies. If you wrote any replies, the gadget in the lower left corner of the screen is labeled Pack, which corresponds to the Pack replies menu item. Q-Blue will then compress all your replies into a single file you can upload, using the same archiving method that it used to unpack the messages you read. The gadget in the lower left corner will now read Close, as it does when no replies have yet been written; it and the C key are equivalent to the Close packet menu item. This command tells Q-Blue to clear this message packet from its memory when you’re done reading it, so you can read another.

Or instead, you can exit Q-Blue with the Quit gadget or the Quit Q-Blue menu item. If you do this while a mail packet is still open, it will put up a requester giving you the option of leaving the packet’s files still in your work directory after quitting, so you can resume reading later without needing to unpack it again (see the end of section 9.3).

If you wrote any replies, it’s time now to call the BBS back. Log on again, start the mail door again, and tell it to receive a reply upload. On some BBSes, there may be a single command telling it to receive a reply packet, without using a door program. Send the file when it tells you to, wait for it to post the messages it got, and log off again. You’re all done. If you want to save phone calls, you can wait until the next time you want to download, and do your uploading in the same call.

PART II: CONFIGURATION

3) STARTING Q-BLUE, AND BASIC CONFIGURATION

3.1) Configuration files and startup options

Q-Blue stores its configuration settings in files. When starting Q-Blue, you can optionally specify what file Q-Blue will load its configuration from. You can do this either on the command line or in the Workbench icon. The file S:Q-Blue.config is used by default, if you do not specify a different one. These files are created with the Save setup command inside Q-Blue, which is described in the next section. If the standard configuration file does not exist, Q-Blue will use default values, which will not let you read mail without filling in some paths that are left blank in the Directories setup window (see section 3.4 and especially 3.5).

To specify a configuration file in a CLI command, type the full pathname of the file after the word “CONFIG” on the Q-Blue command line: for instance, “Q-Blue config S:Other.config”. (As mentioned above, there is no need to type “Run”, because Q-Blue detaches itself to run in the background.) With an icon, select the icon and use the Workbench Information menu item to edit the icon’s “Tool Type” lines. A Tool Type line that begins with “CONFIG=” specifies the configuration file to use; you enter the file’s full name after the equal sign. The icon comes with a sample “CONFIG=” line with parentheses around it; remove the parentheses to use it with a real filename.

You can create project icons which have Q-Blue as their “default tool” and different configuration files specified with the Tool Type line; each icon, when double-clicked, will run Q-Blue with a different setup. This can also be used for variations in other Tool Type options such as “PACKET”, of course. Note that such project icons should not be attached to real files; they must be bare icons or, due to the internal design of the Workbench, Q-Blue will mistake the file for a mail packet to open. In other words, if your project icon is saved under the name Alternate-Blue (from IconEdit, for instance), make sure there is no actual file named Alternate-Blue in the same drawer. If there are no Tool Types in the project icon, those of the Q-Blue tool icon itself will apply. If it can’t find or can’t read the specified file, it will attempt to use the standard file S:Q-Blue.config.

You can also specify a packet to be opened, just by putting the filename of the mail packet on the command line. A command such as “Q-Blue Work:Mail/whatever.qwk”, tells it to immediately try to open the named file as a mail packet and display the messages in it, as if you had started up Q-Blue, given the Open command, and then selected this file as the one to open. The same thing happens if you click on the Q-Blue icon and then shift-double-click on the icon of a mail packet. (Of course, the packet does not need an actual icon if the Workbench Show >> All Files option is used.) With icon Tool Types, the equivalent is a line starting with “PACKET=”, such as “PACKET=Work:Mail/whatever.qwk”. The word OPEN can be substituted for PACKET in the Tool Type line, for compatibility with older versions of Q-Blue. On the command line, the word PACKET may optionally be used before the packet filename. You need not specify an absolute pathname; you can give a filename relative to the downloads directory specified in Q-Blue’s setup (see section 3.4). For instance, the example above could be just “Q-Blue whatever.qwk” if you have selected Work:Mail as your downloads directory. Section 8 of this manual has full detail on the process of opening mail packets for reading.

You can also specify a wildcard pattern after the word PACKET. In this case, it searches through all files matching the pattern, to decide what file to open as a mail packet. If more than one file matches, it selects the newest one which does not have a name ending in “.NEW” or “.REP” — those names indicate reply packets. So if you call a BBS that uses Blue Wave, and download packets with names like WHATEVER.MO1 or WHATEVER.TU1, you can create a project icon which will open whichever of those packets is newest by giving it a tool type that reads “PACKET=whatever.???”. You may also use a path before the pattern, but Q-Blue does not handle wildcards in the directory path part of the name; something like “work:mail/#?/whatever.#?” will not work. Note that if the only filenames fitting the wildcard pattern are reply packets, it will attempt to open one of these as a mail packet. This will, of course, produce an error message when it tries to read the mail.

You can add the keyword NOPACKET. If this is specified along with a filename for the PACKET option, the file you name is treated as a BBS file, of the kind that you would select with the Open (no packet) menu option. As a tooltype, enter “NOPACKET=Yes” or just “NOPACKET”. The filename goes after “PACKET=” as above; the two are separate tooltypes when used in an icon. This option allows you to write messages for a BBS without opening a real mail packet to reply to. If you name such a file without the word NOPACKET, you’ll get an error message, and the same applies if you name a real mail packet when using this option. When NOPACKET is used, the default directory in which it looks for the file you name is your BBS context directory, instead of your downloads directory. The BBS context directory is where Q-Blue saves the BBS files for the various BBSes you read mail from. Section 3.4 explains how to select this directory.

You may also use the keyword POPKEY in the command or in a tool type. If this word is followed by a key description such as is used by commodity programs, for instance “POPKEY=control lcommand q” to indicate a press of the letter Q with the Ctrl and left Amiga keys held down, then Q-Blue will pop its screen to the front whenever that key combination is pressed, no matter what window or program is active, or reopen its screen if it is iconified. By default, there is no special key and this feature is unused. When used on the command line, a key description with spaces in it must have quotes around it. And note that due to peculiarities of the Amiga commodities system, if you specify a letter key (such as Q in the example), you must type the letter in lowercase or the result may not work properly.

The final option that can be used in the command line or in a Tool Type is LIST (or OPENLIST, for compatibility with older versions). If you type “Q-Blue list” at a command prompt, or use a Tool Type line reading “LIST=Yes” or just “LIST”, then Q-Blue will not try to open a particular mail packet file when it starts up, but will immediately display a list of the files available to open in your downloads directory, in the same way it does if you use the Open gadget or menu command within Q-Blue. If NOPACKET is also specified, it will display a list of BBS files as if you had used the Open (no packet) command. LIST is ignored if a mail packet filename is also specified, unless the packet cannot be opened.

If you give the command “Q-Blue ?” it will prompt you with its command template, giving you another chance to enter arguments.  The template it will prompt you with is

PACKET,CONFIG/K,POPKEY/K,NOPACKET/S,LIST=OPENLIST/S

As with any Amiga program, words that are followed by an equal sign when used as icon tooltypes are instead followed by a space when used on the command line, for example “Q-Blue packet whatever.qwk”. It will detach from the CLI after you enter the arguments. Or you can press Ctrl-C at this point to stop the program from running.

The keywords such as CONFIG on the command line can be upper or lower case, but Tool Type keywords are generally all uppercase — lowercase won’t work at all under AmigaDOS 2.04, though it will under AmigaDOS 2.1. The four options may appear in any order. For example, “Q-Blue config S:OtherConfig whatever.qwk” specifies that whatever.qwk should be opened after loading the setup from S:OtherConfig.

Note that the supplied Workbench icon contains a stack setting of 8000. Do not use an icon without this stack setting — Q-Blue will refuse to run, showing an error message in a system requester on the Workbench screen. When run from a CLI prompt it sets its own stack automatically as it detaches itself to run in the background, so the CLI’s stack setting does not matter.

3.2) The Setup menu; loading and saving configurations

All of the commands for setting up Q-Blue are found in the rightmost of the four pull-down menus, which is labeled Setup. The top item, Sort messages, is a submenu that lets you choose in what order to read the messages in a mail packet. The setting currently selected has a checkmark next to it. You can pick a different setting either by selecting the appropriate menu item, or with a keyboard shortcut. The shortcuts in these submenus are shown in each menu subitem with “Ctrl-” in front of the key you need to press, meaning that you have to hold down the Ctrl key while pressing the letter. The Ctrl key is not used for any menu commands except setting the message sorting order. The various settings are explained in the next section.

In the middle of the Setup menu are seven menu items which allow you to configure different parts of the setup: Directories, Editor, Replying, Compressors, Font & Screen, Options, and BBS Local. Each of these opens a window with gadgets for telling Q-Blue the necessary information — we will refer to them as the Directories setup window, the Editor setup window, and so on. They can be opened with the keyboard as well as by using the menu; the key shortcuts are Alt-D, Alt-E, Alt-Y, Alt-C, Alt-F, Alt-O, and Alt-B. The Directories window is covered in sections 3.4 and 3.5; the Editor and Compressors windows are explained at length in sections 4 and 5 respectively; the other three windows are covered in section 6.

If either the Directories or the Editor window is not set up at least minimally, Q-Blue will put up a requester when the program starts, reminding you to finish the setup before reading mail. The other five setup windows have default settings that may not need to be changed. The Directories window starts out empty, so you must set some paths there before the program can be used. The editor window has a default configuration using the “Ed” editor.

At the bottom of the Setup menu are items labeled Load setup and Save setup — their shortcuts are Alt-L and Alt-S. Save setup is used for creating configuration files that can be either loaded with Load setup or specified at startup time, for instance with a “CONFIG=” icon tool type (see section 3.1). It stores in this small file every option setting that you can change with the Setup menu, except those in the BBS Local window, which are stored in their own separate files. It also stores the current setting of the Compression type submenu of the Packet menu, which is covered in section 8.1.

The Load setup and Save setup commands each open a file requester for selecting where the data should be read from or written to. The default filename is whatever configuration file was last loaded or saved, or the one the program loaded when it started up. If you load in a different file with Load setup, every setting in the Setup menu could be changed. All changes take immediate effect except for: (1) the font and screen settings, which take effect when you close and reopen the screen (see sections 6.2 and 8.1), and (2) if a packet is currently open, the work and reply directory settings, which take effect the next time a packet is opened (see section 3.5). If the message writing window is open, Load setup will refuse to change the sort order or anything in the Editor setup window (see section 4.1). To take full effect, it should not be used while writing a message.

Q-Blue 2.4 can load old configuration files written by any past version of Q-Blue, and in fact, the original Q-Blue 0.7 can read configuration files written by any later version. This makes replacing an old version of Q-Blue with a new one quite painless, because you don’t have to redo any of the installation or setup procedures. All you have to do is copy the new version of the program over the old one (you can just drop the new one’s icon on top of the old one), and next time you use it, pick settings for any new options that weren’t present in the old version. The options added between versions 2.1 and 2.3 are in the Options and BBS Local setup windows, with one new item in the Editor window. Q-Blue 2.4 adds only one further Options item.

Also stored in the configuration file are the current positions and sizes of the various windows that Q-Blue opens. If you open a setup window or a list window or a search window or a message writing window, and move or resize them, Q-Blue will remember where on the screen you last left them, and if you then use Save setup, from then on it will reopen those windows in the same places. The three ASL requesters do not always follow this rule: they only remember their new positions if you actually select something, not if you cancel them. Also, the font requester won’t remember a new position at all if you are using version 37 of asl.library (the one that came with AmigaDOS 2.04). If you are using that old version, you should get a more up-to-date copy from someone who has AmigaDOS 2.1 or newer, because there is no screen mode requester in that version, and the file requester is very slow. The newer asl.library from 2.1 will work fine even if the rest of the system is not updated.

If you change the screen to a different display mode, so that the screen is not the same height as it was the last time a given window was open, any window you reopen will reset to its default position. Changing the width of the screen does not affect this, because all of the windows automatically stretch and shrink horizontally in proportion to the screen. The only window which never remembers a new position is the console window that the output of compression commands is displayed in.

3.3) Message sorting order

The order in which messages are sorted is set with a submenu at the top of the Setup menu, labeled Sort messages. It can be used both to select in what order messages will appear when a packet is opened, and to re-order the messages you are reading. Note: your replies are not resorted, but left in the order they were written. Bulletins and other special files are also not resorted. The sorting does not affect the ordering of message areas, only the sequence of messages within each area. There are six choices of sorting order:

• by number; shortcut Ctrl-N. This is the default setting. It shows the messages in their “natural” order — usually the same order that they would appear if you read them online, according to the numbers that the BBS assigns them as they are added to the message areas.
• by age; shortcut Ctrl-A. This sorts messages by the date and time each message was first written, from oldest to newest. Numeric order is often not very different from chronological order, but when offline readers and networks are involved, the time a message appears on the BBS may be different from when it was created. Also note that the times on messages are local and do not include time zone information, so a message from New York written at noon is actually older than one from California written at 11:00 AM, but Q-Blue will think it’s newer.
• by subject; shortcut Ctrl-S. This sorts messages according to the alphabetical order of their title or subject lines. This tends to put messages on a given topic together in one place. If “Re:” is present at the beginning of the subject line, it only pays attention to the remaining text after that. Messages with the same subject are sorted by age. It attempts to recognize cases where a subject line has been truncated, and consider the short version “equal” to the longer one.
• by thread; shortcut Ctrl-D. Any message that is a reply to an earlier one, or which has been replied to later, often stores the identifying numbers of those messages in its header information. Sorting by thread causes all sets of messages connected to each other in this manner to be collected into groups. Each group is sorted internally by age, and the groups themselves are sequenced alphabetically by the subject line of the oldest message in each, at least roughly. This method lets you read each “conversation” as one group of adjacent messages.
• by who from; shortcut Ctrl-F. This sorts alphabetically by the names of the messages’ authors, so that all messages from one person are together in one place. Messages by one author are put in numeric order, which should be the same as chronological order unless they post from two different BBSes.
• by who to; shortcut Ctrl-T. This sorts by the names that the messages are addressed to. This can let you, in a way, put yourself in someone else’s shoes, seeing the mail addressed to a particular person all together.

There is another checked option below these, marked Last name first?, with the shortcut Ctrl-L. When this is checked, sorting by authors’ or addressees’ names (by who from and by who to) is done alphabetically by last name. When it’s not checked names are sorted by first name first, which is especially suitable if the messages are written using “handles” instead of real names. It is not checked by default. Q-Blue knows that words such as “Ph.D” or “Sr.” or “III” are not last names; a name like “Ludwig van Beethoven Jr.” will be sorted under “Beethoven” if this option is checked.

When you change the sort order of a packet you are reading, it’s not possible to “keep your place” in an area you have already read some messages in. Whatever message is “current” in each area will remain current; in particular, the message displayed onscreen will not change. But messages you have read before it may now be after it, and unread messages may now be before it. You can use the List messages command to see which ones have been read (section 7.5 describes how the list window indicates which messages have been read). This is a change in behavior from Q-Blue 1.0: in that version, it would select as current the message just before the first unread message found in the area.

Caution: sorting Blue Wave packets by date is not always reliable. The dates are in text form only, and may be stored in a variety of different formats, like “8 Jun 94” or “06-08-94” or “6/8/1994”. It can’t always be certain which number is the day and which is the month. That second example could mean either June 8 or August 6 depending on what country the message came from or what software was used to write it. Q-Blue will assume June 8 in this case.

Sorting by thread often does not work as well as it should. Many messages do not store the information on which other messages are connected to them, so there may be many “gaps” between messages that ought to be associated. How well the grouping will work depends greatly on what BBS you download the messages from. In some cases this information on which messages were replies to which is entirely absent, and in others it is very spotty. This is why connected groups are sorted in order of subject: so that messages that should be connected, but aren’t, will still tend to end up near each other.

3.4) The Directories setup window

The most important single part of setting up Q-Blue is telling it what directories it will use. The window for this purpose is opened by the Directories command in the Setup menu. The keyboard shortcut for this window is Alt-D. This window, which is labeled Pathnames of essential directories in its title bar, has seven string gadgets. In the first five are the pathnames of the directories which Q-Blue uses. If any of these directories are not specified, then Q-Blue cannot function fully. This window will open automatically if you try to open a packet, or create replies, with necessary directories unspecified. The five directories are:

• the Downloads directory: enter the complete pathname of the directory into which you will download mail packets from the BBSes you call.
• the Uploads directory: enter the complete pathname of the directory from which replies will be uploaded to the BBSes you call. This may be the same as the downloads directory. Typically, you would set these to be whatever directories your telecommunications program is already using for this purpose.
• the BBS context directory: this is where Q-Blue stores certain files related to the different BBSes that you call. It keeps files needed for several special features here, including the Open (no packet) command and the BBS Local setup window.
• the Work directory: this is where all of the contents of the download packet will be unpacked. This MUST be a directory that is not used for any other files, because when you unpack mail, Q-Blue will DELETE EVERY FILE in this directory. It is explained further in the next section. The default setting is “T:” — this must be changed if your computer does not have much spare memory.
• the Replies directory: this is where Q-Blue stores the messages you write, before they are compressed for uploading. As with the work directory, this one MUST NOT be used for anything else, because Q-Blue will DELETE EVERY FILE in it when you open a mail packet or BBS file. It may also delete them when the packet is closed, if you set the Flush replies at close option. This one is also covered further in the next section.

Make sure that you specify each directory as a complete pathname, so that it will always point to the same place regardless of what the program’s current directory is. Q-Blue will object if you enter a non-absolute pathname — that is, a path not containing a colon after the first word. All leading and trailing blanks will be removed from whatever you enter in the directory gadgets.

The downloads directory is where Q-Blue looks for mail packets when you give the Open packet command. That command normally opens a list window displaying the mail packets found in that directory, in order of age. If there is no downloads directory or if it is empty, the ASL file requester can be used to open a mail packet in any directory.

The uploads directory is where Q-Blue creates reply packets for uploading. It is also where it checks to see whether a given mail packet has an existing reply packet that goes with it. The downloads and uploads directories are used by Q-Blue only for storing compressed archive files, downloaded from the BBS or intended for uploading to it, but other unrelated files can be stored there if desired. The various files that go inside these archives, which Q-Blue accesses when reading or writing messages, are kept in the work and replies directories while they are in use.

The BBS context directory is used to store four types of files: “BBS files” which are used in the Open (no packet) command described in section 8.4; “local setup files” which store the settings used for a particular BBS, and are created with the BBS Local setup window (see section 6.8); “marks” files, which store information on which messages have and have not been read in a given packet, and what the last message read in each area was, so that if you close a packet and then reopen it later, you will resume just where you left off; and “pointer” files, which are extracted from mail packets and, with some mail doors, will allow you to “undo” your last download if you need to reread the last batch of messages (see section 8.3). If this directory is not specified, Q-Blue will work normally except for these features. You should specify some place where files will remain intact between different uses of Q-Blue. In other words, do not use a ram disk directory.

The Work and Replies directories are covered in the next section. The section after that (3.6) covers the last two gadgets, which are separated by a line from the five directory path gadgets. The default work directory, “T:”, should be changed if your computer doesn’t have much spare memory. Pressing the tab key will activate the uppermost empty directory gadget, or if none are empty, it will activate the downloads directory gadget. When you are done putting information into this window, just close it either by clicking the close gadget or pressing the Esc key. It may refuse to close the window if there is something wrong with your selections — for instance, if one of the directory paths you named actually specifies a file. If this happens you must correct the problem before closing the window.

3.5) The two most crucial directories

Q-Blue can, if necessary, function more or less normally with most of the gadgets in the Directories setup window left unset. But two of the directories are crucial to its operation. They are the Work directory and the Replies directory. The former is used to store the files that constitute a mail packet, while you are reading it. The latter is used to store the replies you are writing in response. In both cases, NO OTHER FILES should be kept in these directories. Anything that does not belong there may be ERASED. A directory in ram disk is a good choice for the work directory, if you can spare the room, because the files it puts here are strictly temporary, and if they are put on a slow device, such as a floppy disk, it will create annoying delays. However, if you don’t have plenty of spare memory after starting Q-Blue, ram disk is not a good choice. And I do mean plenty of spare memory, because not only can the temporary files placed here take up hundreds of kilobytes in some cases, but many modern compression programs require another 200 or 300 Kb free in order to pack your replies for uploading. You may also use a ram disk subdirectory for your replies, but since these usually do not take up much space or much time to write to disk (unless you are an exceedingly verbose message writer), it’s safer not to use a ram disk. The work directory’s contents can always be replaced by just reopening the mail packet, but your replies may not be so easy to replace if there is a crash or other failure.

Since the work and replies directories must each be used for only that purpose and nothing else, it is safest to specify directories that do not yet exist. Q-Blue will create them when they are needed, as long as the parent directory exists. If you specify a name ending in a colon — that is, if you give a device or volume name, or an assigned name — then Q-Blue will append the subdirectory name “Q-work” onto it. The same rules hold for the replies directory, except that if it appends a subdirectory name it uses “Q-rep”. This behavior was new as of Q-Blue 2.0, and allows one to simply specify “RAM:” or some other disk name for both directories, whereas in old versions this would not work. If you give a pathname not ending in a colon, then it uses the directory just as you specified it. If you select a work or replies directory that already has some files in it, Q-Blue will display a warning message.

It will display an error message if either the work or the replies directory (including any appended subdirectory name) has the same path as any other directory in the Directories setup window. You will have to fix the error before it will let you close the window.

If you run more than one copy of Q-Blue at a time, the different copies must all use different work and replies directory names. But this is handled automatically; it appends numbers onto the specified names to give each process a unique name to use. Only the un-numbered name is shown in the setup window or saved in the configuration file. A similar stratagem is used for the temporary filenames used in the Editor setup window. If you ever run two copies of Q-Blue at once, don’t be surprised if you find that you’ve got an “extra” replies directory on your disk. If the original replies directory is named “Work:Mail/replies”, for instance, the extra one would be named “Work:Mail/replies1”. And if your work directory is given as “RAM:” and you open packets in two processes at once, they will use the directories “RAM:Q-work” and “RAM:Q-work1”.

If more than one Q-Blue process is running, and you manually set one of them to use different directories than the others, then it will not append numbers onto those names. Q-Blue 1.9 would add a number unnecessarily in this case, in processes other than the first one started.

If you change the work or replies directory setting while a mail packet is open, the change will not affect the mail you are reading. It will continue to use the old work and replies directories until you close the packet and open another one. This also applies when Load setup is used. The replies directory setting will take immediate effect if the previous setting was blank or a nonexistent directory.

When you open a BBS file with the Open (no packet) command described in section 8.4, only the replies directory is used. The work directory setting only matters when opening an actual mail packet.

3.6) Non-directory pathnames in the Directories window

Under the five directory gadgets in the Directories setup window, separated from them by a line, are two other string gadgets. The upper one is labeled Printer output filename. The default string in it is “PRT:”. It specifies where the output should be sent when you tell Q-Blue to print a message. If this gadget is blank, the Print message command will give an error message. You can specify a disk file here, or something like “PAR:” to send text out the parallel port without being translated by the Amiga printer driver.

Use of “PAR:” or something similar to access a port directly is often necessary if you are trying to print a message using the IBM character set. Many printers understand IBM special characters, but the printer.device driver does not, and will assume the message is using the Amiga’s usual 8 bit ISO character set and try to print it accordingly. If your printer is built to use IBM characters, the driver will translate ISO characters into their nearest IBM equivalents, unaware that the text being printed is in IBM form already. There is no good way to tell the Amiga to use a different character set when printing, so usually the best you can do is just hope that your printer can do the right thing if you send the message to it unfiltered. However, one disadvantage of using PAR: or an equivalent instead of PRT: is that there is no good way to abort a failed attempt at printing.

Last is a string labeled Path for saving messages. This is used with the Save msg as file command (section 9.4). It specifies a default path to be used when it opens a file requester to ask you where the message should be saved. You can specify the name of a file here, so that the save command will, by default, append the text of messages you save onto that file. Or you can specify a directory name here, so that the requester knows what directory to look in but you can pick any filename within that directory. If you put a slash (“/”) on the end of the path, or use a name ending in a colon (“:”), Q-Blue will know that the path is a directory and not a filename. This is not necessary if the directory exists and can be found when the ASL requester is opened, but may be useful if it specifies, for example, a directory on a disk that’s not always mounted.

4) SETTING UP A TEXT EDITOR FOR WRITING REPLIES

4.1) The Editor setup window

The Editor menu item in the Setup menu, or the keyboard shortcut Alt-E, opens the window titled Configuration of text editor for writing messages. It will be opened automatically if you try to write a message with no editor configured. There are four string gadgets to set here, but two of them are optional. Below them are three checkmark gadgets, for controlling whether Q-Blue’s screen will be moved behind other screens before starting the editor, or moved up front when the editor command finishes, and for specifying whether the editor can handle upper-ascii characters.

Q-Blue can edit messages in two different ways. The first, which is used for writing or re-editing messages that are not replies, just edits one text file. The second method uses two files, with your reply in one and a copy of the message you are replying to in the other. The second method need not, and in some cases must not be specified; if it is not, the first method is used for all reply editing.

The four string gadgets let you specify two temporary filenames and two editor commands — one pair for each type of editing. The four strings are:

• the temporary filename used for editing messages. The default is “RAM:Reply”. You should almost certainly use a file in ram disk. When it’s time to edit a message, Q-Blue will write whatever text is to be edited into this file, call the editor, and then read the text back in from this file when the editing is done.
• an optional second filename which, if specified, gives the name of a temporary file (typically in ram disk) into which Q-Blue will write the contents of whatever message you are replying to, modified according to your current quote style setting. You can specify this if your editor can hold two files at once and allow you to conveniently move pieces from one to the other. See section 4.3 below for a more complete description of how this can be used.
• the command used to edit the first temporary file. Typically this would just be the name of the editor followed by the name of the file, or the special sequence “@F”. For instance, if your regular editor is MEmacs (supplied on the AmigaDOS Extras disk), your command would be “MEmacs RAM:Reply”, or “MEmacs @F”. The “@F” sequence is replaced with the name of the file in the first string gadget. If your editor has an ARexx port, you could create an ARexx script to feed the file to the editor, and use a command such as “RX MyScript @F”. In this case you could leave the editor running all the time instead of exiting after each use. The default command is “Ed @F”, which uses the simple editor Ed which is included in the C: directory of standard Workbench disks.
• an optional command to edit a reply using both of the temporary filenames, with the quoted original in one and your reply in the other. Note that many editors only allow you to specify one file in the command used to start them up — in this case it may not be possible to create a useful command here. The sequence “@O” (that’s the letter O for “Original”, not a zero) is replaced with the second filename wherever it appears; “@F” with the first filename as in the first command. “@O” has no meaning in the first command, only in the second.

If you run more than one copy of Q-Blue, the temporary filenames actually used for editing messages may not match the names you specify exactly; they will have digits added to their names to make them unique. This is one reason why “@F” and “@O” are available as shorthand designations for the two files. But if you simply write out the filenames fully in the commands, as was done in older versions of Q-Blue, it will recognize them and replace them when needed with the modified filenames.

Note that it is possible to edit the settings in this window while in the middle of writing a message. This should be done only with care. For instance, if you change the first filename, Q-Blue may be unable to load the reply you’re writing until you somehow rename the temporary file you’ve created to match.

As with the Directories setup window, pressing the tab key will activate a string gadget. Which one it activates depends on which ones do and do not have some text in them — it tries to guess which one most “needs” editing. Leading and trailing blanks will be removed from whatever you put in the gadgets.

At the bottom of the window are three checkmark gadgets. The first two gadgets are labeled Before edit, screen to back and After edit, screen to front. The first one, when checked, tells Q-Blue to move its custom screen behind other screens before running the editor. This may help make the editor’s screen, or the Workbench screen if it uses that, be visible if the editor does not pop to the front by itself. By default it is turned on, which is suitable for use with the default editor C:Ed, which normally opens its window on the Workbench screen.

The After edit, screen to front checkmark tells Q-Blue to move its own screen to the front after the editor command finishes. This may reduce the need to shuffle through screens to find Q-Blue. But this is only useful if the editor command waits until you are done editing before returning. If your command merely sends an ARexx message or two to the editor and doesn’t wait, or if your editor is a self-detaching program, the command will finish almost immediately and this option would cause Q-Blue’s screen to pop up and cover the screen you’re trying to edit on, before you can write anything. It is also checked by default, as is suitable for the default editing command.

The final checkmark gadget is labeled Remove upper ascii and control characters. Certain editors will not correctly handle characters that are outside the basic ASCII character set, such as accented or umlauted letters, or ANSI control codes. Particularly, the basic Ed editor that comes with AmigaDOS, which is the default editor in Q-Blue’s initial setup, will reject any file that contains such characters, complaining that the file is “binary”. When this gadget is checked, any such offending characters in the text being edited are replaced with asterisks. With almost every other editor, this gadget should be unchecked.

4.2) Specifying commands for running an editor

Mostly, the commands that go into the second and fourth string gadgets in the Editor setup window can be just simple copies of commands you would type at a CLI prompt, but not always. There are special codes you can include in them, which are marked by the use of an “@” character. The “@F” and “@O” codes have already been mentioned. They are optional; you can always just type out a filename given in the other string gadgets. But those two are not the only special codes available.

You can put two or more commands in each editor command gadget, by separating them with the characters “@N”. This gets translated into a line break. When the command is run, it behaves as if you had typed the first part, pressed return, and then typed the next one. You can have any number of consecutive commands, as long as they all fit in the string gadget, which holds 255 characters. The letter N after the at-sign can be upper or lower case. For example, if some editor called MyEd requires a large stack setting, you could put a “Stack” command in front of the editor command, like this:

Stack 16000 @N MyEd RAM:Reply

Any auxiliary commands which you wish to apply to the message, such as a stand-alone spell checker or fancy tagline utility, can be included before or after the editor command, separated by “@N” sequences.

There are a few other codes you can use in editor commands. The sequence “@S” is replaced with an eight digit hexadecimal number that gives the address of Q-Blue’s custom screen. This is provided for any software that wants to open windows on Q-Blue’s screen and uses a direct screen address rather than the name of a public screen. This feature may not be supported in future Q-Blue releases; it is useful mainly for use with ConMan (see below). Most modern programs that can open on different screens take a public screen name rather than a raw hex address, and Q-Blue’s screen is public. Its screen name is Q-BLUE unless that name is already taken, in which case a number will be added to the end, for example Q-BLUE1, to make it unique. Usually the number added to the public screen name is the same one that is added to the names of the work and replies directories, and the temporary editing filenames, when you run more than one copy of Q-Blue at once. The sequence “@P” is replaced with the correct public screen name. By giving a window specification such as “CON:0/0/640/200/My Window Name/CLOSE/SCREEN @P”, you can open console windows on Q-Blue’s screen. This can be used, for instance, with the Ed editor, using its “WINDOW” argument, with an editor command such as this:

Ed @F WINDOW "CON:0/12/640/188/Edit reply/CLOSE/SCREEN @P"

With this command, the Ed editing window will appear on Q-Blue’s screen instead of the Workbench screen. In this case the Screen to back before and Screen to front after gadgets should be turned off. But Ed has one small problem when run this way: any requesters it opens appear on the Workbench screen instead of on Q-Blue’s screen. If you are still using ConMan, use the window specification “CON:S@S/0/12/640/188/Edit reply/C” instead of the example given above. In either case, the numbers giving the size of the window should be adjusted to match the size of screen you are using with Q-Blue.

The codes “@B” and “@Q” are also available, and they work the same way in editor commands that they do in compressor commands (see section 5.3): whatever follows a “@B” sequence is ignored up until another “@B” is found, if the currently open packet is not in Blue Wave format, and likewise material between “@Q” sequences is ignored if the current packet is not in QWK format. So if you want an editor command that works one way for QWK and another way for Blue Wave, put the Blue Wave part between two “@B” codes and the QWK part between two “@Q” codes. Any other character after an at-sign is included in the command as is, with the “@” itself discarded. So if you want to put an actual at-sign in the command, use “@@”.

When Q-Blue runs these commands, it uses your command path setting to find the programs to run. To be specific: if Q-Blue was started from a CLI prompt, it uses the path known to the parent CLI process (if any), otherwise it uses the path known to the Workbench. The Workbench process learns the path from what was set in the original CLI when the “LoadWB” command was executed to start it. If no path is found in these places, it will look for some other CLI window that has a path, and use that. The same rule applies when it runs compressor commands.

Q-Blue is “deaf” to all input while the editor command is running. It cannot do anything at all until the editor command finishes. It shows this by changing your mouse pointer to a stopwatch image and also by ghosting the gadgets in the message writing window.

It’s a good idea to keep your right margin in the editor set no higher than 77, because some BBS systems do not correctly handle uploaded messages with lines 78 or more characters long. And usually, it’s more convenient for others if your text is narrower than that, with a right margin of about 74 or 72. This makes it easier, for instance, for people to quote what you say with some marker in the left margin without having to break long lines.

4.3) Why use two separate editor commands?

Some people find the meanings of the two different pairs of editor commands and filenames confusing. A few examples may help to illustrate how they work. Assume you’re reading a message from some hypothetical person we’ll call John Smith, which says:

Do the right thing.
Vote Republican.

Since you are a rabid Anarcho-Syndicalist and have a low opinion of Republicans, you decide to give that ignorant Mr. Smith a piece of your mind. You select Reply and then Edit. Let’s assume that your quote style setting is “Add XX>” (see section 6.4 for information on quote style choices).

First let’s look at what happens if you have a simple editor setup using one filename and one command. Q-Blue will write out a file, which with the default setup will be named “RAM:Reply”, containing these lines:

JS> Do the right thing.
JS> Vote Republican.

and then run your editor to edit that file. The “JS>” markers are a commonly used way of reminding readers that these words are not yours, but quoted from what John Smith said. If you specify a Quote header (see section 6.5) then that introductory text will be written above the two “JS>” lines. You decide to use the line “Vote Republican” to remind people of what John Smith’s message said. So you delete the line saying “Do the right thing”, put a blank line after “Vote Republican” and start typing, and save the file when you’re done. The result will be a message from you to John Smith with the line “JS> Vote Republican” at the top.

If you later decide to re-edit this reply, because you’ve thought of even more reasons why Republicanism is wrong and only Anarcho-Syndicalism can save the world, Q-Blue will fill up the file RAM:Reply with a copy of the message you wrote before, still with “JS> Vote Republican” at the top, and give that to the editor.

If you use an editor setup with two commands, then when you select Edit the first time to write the message, the file RAM:Reply will be empty, except for your “signature” if you have specified one. The two lines starting with “JS>” will be in a different file — the second one named in the Editor setup window. Let’s say it’s named “RAM:Quotee”. Both of the files RAM:Quotee and RAM:Reply will be loaded separately into your editor. Instead of deleting the “Do the right thing” line, in this case you would copy the “Vote Republican” line from RAM:Quotee to RAM:Reply, using the clipboard or whatever other method your editor provides for moving chunks between two separate files loaded at once. Then you would type your response into RAM:Reply below the copied line, and save that file when finished.

If you re-edit the message later, your editor will be loaded with your existing reply text in RAM:Reply (including the copied lines) and the two “JS>” lines in RAM:Quotee as before. So if you decide to use the “Do the right thing” line which you left out earlier, you can copy it across now. This is one big advantage of using two files: if you left out some part of the quoted text and then change your mind and want to use it, it’s still available in the other file. Also, if you only want to use a small part of the quote, you don’t have to take the time to delete all the other parts — you just lift the one small part you want out of that file and paste it into the other. (This should help eliminate the annoying faux pas of writing a reply which quotes the entire text of a long message and only adds a one line response at the end, or worse yet accidentally posting the quoted text with no reply.)

If you specify a signature string (see section 6.5), then if you have one editing command, the signature text will be written out after the quoted lines. You should write your reply after the quoted lines and before the signature lines, for the resulting message to have the most easily understandable form. If you use two editing commands, then the signature will be written into the reply file, not into the quote file. The editor will be started with quoted text in one window and the signature in the other. You would write your reply above the signature. So using a signature is easier with two files, because you just start writing at the beginning, which is probably where the editor leaves the cursor when the file is loaded.

This all, of course, requires that you be using a text editor which is capable of being loaded with two different files at once and moving blocks of text from one to the other. If you don’t use such an editor, then you should make sure that the two gadgets gadgets labeled Optional in the Editor setup window have nothing in them. The default editor C:Ed is one editor that cannot load two files at once, so the second filename and the second command should not be used with it.

If you do put something in the lower command string, it would typically be the name of your editor, or perhaps something like “RX SomeScript”, followed by both of the two filenames specified in the string gadgets above, or the equivalent codes @O and @F. For instance, if you use MEmacs, you would enter the string “SYS:Tools/MEmacs @O @F” or something similar. When MEmacs is run with a command like this, it will display a split screen with one file in the top half and the other in the bottom half. It might be appropriate in some cases to put the two names in the opposite order, depending on how you want the editor to behave. Try it both ways if you’re not sure.

If you are writing an original message instead of replying, or replying with the quote style set to None, it will not use the second command and filename — it will just use the first command to edit the message in one file. If you are carbon-copying a message, it will use just the one file, except when you are carbon-copying one of your replies, in which case it will create the second file containing the quoted original that the other message was a reply to. In other words, when carbon-copying a reply, it acts as if you were re-editing that reply, except that it creates a new message from it. When carbon-copying anything else, it acts as if you were creating a new message, except that the text is filled in ahead of time. See section 10 for complete information on creating replies, new messages, and carbon copies.

If you do use quoted text in your reply, please remember that many of your readers have already seen the message, and don’t need to read it all again. Keep only the essential points, or just enough for readers to keep their place in the discussion, in your reply. Excessive quoting of older messages, as well as being tedious for readers, can cost money for the people who provide us with BBS services.

4.4) Using an editor with ARexx

As mentioned above, the command you specify does not need to wait for the editor to finish with the file before returning; Q-Blue doesn’t read the file produced by the editor until you tell it to save the message. It assumes that the editor could still be changing the file, right up until you tell it to save the finished reply. This state of affairs is routine when ARexx is used. If you are sending ARexx commands to an editor, you should if possible tell it to move its own screen to the front. And such a script should check whether the editor’s port exists, and if not, start the editor and wait for the port to appear.

If you are using an editor that responds to ARexx commands, then you can put a command in Q-Blue’s editor setup window which executes an ARexx script instead of running the actual editor program. This script would be stored in your REXX: directory, with a name such as Q-Blue-edit.rexx. Your editor command would then be “RX Q-Blue-edit @F”, or something similar. The following

is an example of such an ARexx script, using the AmigaDOS 2.04 version of Ed as a stand-in for whatever real editor you prefer:

/* Q-Blue-edit.rexx: load a file into Ed 2.00 */
parse arg filename .

if ~show('l','rexxsupport.library') then
    if ~addlib('rexxsupport.library',0,-30) then
        exit 20

portname = 'Ed'
i = 0
if ~show('Ports', portname) then do
    address command 'Run <nil: >nil: Ed nil:'
    do while ~show('Ports', portname)
       call delay 15                     /* 0.3 seconds */
       i = i + 1
       if i > 33 then exit 10            /* allow 10 seconds */
    end
end
address value portname

'OP "' || filename || '"'
'SR 74'                      /* adjust to suit your taste */

This script will automatically start Ed if it is not already running, and then send it an “OP” command which tells it what file to edit. The last line has the effect of setting Ed’s line length to 74 characters, so that the text you type in will be word-wrapped to that width. This helps keep your text readable if somebody else quotes it. You might wish to use a higher or lower number. Scripts for other editors with ARexx ports are, for the most part, similar. You typically need to change only: (1) the name of the ARexx command port given in the “portname =” line, (2) the command for starting the editor after the words “address command”, and (3) the actual commands to the editor at the very end. These are all different for each editor. If the editor has a command for bringing its screen to the front, that should be added at the end.

With a script like this, you can take advantage of multitasking and leave the editor running continuously. (Not that this is worth doing if Ed is all you’ve got for an editor. Especially since at least one version of Ed apparently has a bug which, when it’s used this way, causes it to erase the top line of the file it edits!) Hopefully it should not be too difficult to create scripts for more powerful ARexx-equipped editors based on these examples. I use Uedit, which is now in the public domain following the untimely death of its author, Rick Stiles. It will serve as a typical example of how to write a script that can handle editing two files.

4.5) ARexx scripts using two files

For use with a second editor command, using two filenames, the ARexx script would be nearly the same as the example given in the previous section, except that the “parse arg” at the beginning would have two filenames after it, and there would be two file loading commands instead of one, with one of them checking first to make sure the second file was actually included in the command. The beginning of the script would look like this:

/* Q-Blue-edit.rexx: load one or two files into editor */
parse arg replyfile quotefile .

If Ed could load two files, its single “OP” command would become:

if quotefile ~= '' then 'OP "' || quotefile || '"'
'OP "' || replyfile || '"'

This part could be more complicated with some editors; they may require you, for each file, to first use some sort of Open New command to create an empty editing space, and then load the file there with another command.

I will use the public domain editor Uedit here as an example of how to write a working script using two files, and a general example of how to modify the basic script to suit a different editor. With Uedit, the port name is “URexx”, the command to start it running would typically be “Run <nil: >nil: UE”, and the command for loading a new file is “LoadFile”, which unlike Ed’s “OP” command requires no quote marks around the following filename. So, the complete script would be:

/* Q-Blue-edit.rexx: load one or two files into Uedit */
parse arg replyfile quotefile .

if ~show('l','rexxsupport.library') then
    if ~addlib('rexxsupport.library',0,-30) then
        exit 20

portname = 'URexx'
i = 0
if ~show('Ports', portname) then do
    address command 'Run <nil: >nil: UE'
    do while ~show('Ports', portname)
        call delay 15                   /* 0.3 seconds */
        i = i + 1
        if i > 33 then exit 10          /* allow 10 seconds */
    end
end
address value portname

if quotefile ~= '' then 'LoadFile' quotefile
'LoadFile' replyfile
'LineLength 74'
'FrontScreen'

Uedit has no standard ARexx command for setting the right margin or moving its screen to the front, but it’s not difficult to add them. To do so, add two lines reading “linelength 1111+0 |” and “frontscreen 1112+0 |” to Uedit’s “REXXCOMM” file (which should already contain a “loadfile” line), and add the command definitions below to the “Config!R” file, compile them, and save the configuration. These command definitions assume that the buffer and number variable usages have not been rearranged from the defaults used in most Uedit releases:

Set local line length via ARexx. Example: "LINELENGTH 80"
<1111: if (!toNumber(n0, buf61) | gtNum(8, n0) | gtNum(n0, 999)) {
           equateNum(n96, 1)
           rexxOut(" ", all, 10, 1, n99)           .. error
       } else
           setLocal(curFile, lineLength, n0) >     .. success

Pop up Uedit's screen via ARexx. Example: "FRONTSCREEN"
<1112: screenToFront >      .. for version 2.6d or newer only

Note: Uedit may not necessarily be prepared to act on ARexx commands. For this to work, you must make sure that the ARexx “autotraffic” mode is turned on. In Uedit 4.0, the global flag setting command (Ctrl-G) includes a “rexxTraffic (UGB)” option. Make sure this is turned on, and save your config that way so it will stay on next time you use the program. It is also necessary that Uedit be able to find the “REXXCOMM” text file, which should be included with it and which you are adding extra lines to.

An ARexx script for using Uedit with Q-Blue can be quite a bit more sophisticated than this, if desired. If you use Uedit and are interested in some of the fancier tricks that are possible, contact me and ask for the files “Q-Blue.UE” and “qblue.rexx”.

With a script like this, the second editor command should name the reply file before the quote file, not after. The commands in the third and fourth Editor setup window string gadgets could be:

   RX Q-Blue-edit @F

    RX Q-Blue-edit @F @O

All three of the checkmarks should be unchecked. Again, if you do not wish to load the quoted message and your reply in separate files, just leave the bottom string gadget of each type empty. If you use some other editor not mentioned in this manual, with a little luck you should be able to similarly adapt one of the examples above to work with it.

4.6) Using CygnusEd to edit replies

Some editors, including the popular commercial products CygnusEd Professional sold by ASDG Inc., and TurboText from Oxxi Inc., include a small “activator” program which performs the function of loading a file into the editor, starting it if necessary, without using ARexx. This program is called TTX in the case of TurboText, and Ed in the case of CygnusEd (more or less replacing the Ed program on your Workbench disk). With these editors you probably won’t need an ARexx script — you can simply put a command using the activator, such as “Ed RAM:Reply”, in Q-Blue’s Editor setup window.

This section and the one after it (4.7) describe various ways to configure Q-Blue to use CygnusEd. If that’s not your editor, you can skip these two sections. Section 4.8 covers TurboText.

With CygnusEd, you have a choice between starting a new editor process, and editing the files with an existing one. Each approach has advantages and drawbacks. If you use the CED command to create a new editor process, you avoid the troublesome question of dealing with old copies of the file(s) to be edited being left in the editor, and you don’t have to deal with lots of files (the ones used by Q-Blue and whatever else you have also been editing) all crowded together on the same screen. And with newer versions of CygnusEd, you can open the editing window on Q-Blue’s screen. But there are disadvantages too: it uses more memory, and you won’t be able to use the “hot-start” feature because if it’s turned on, then every time you try to edit something in Q-Blue, a requester will pop up on the Workbench screen asking if you really want to start a new process, and you’ll have to find the requester and click OK there before anything can be edited. Using the Ed activator program is more suitable for many users, especially those without lots of extra memory.

Whichever approach you use to starting CygnusEd, there is a neat feature you should use, which avoids the necessity of sending ARexx commands to adjust the settings. The feature is this: if you edit a file with a name ending in “.blue”, it will load its “environment” settings from a file called S:ceddefaults.blue. I recommend that you set Icon creation off, Word wrap on, Tabs = spaces on, and Set right border to about 74, then use Save environment to store these settings in a file named S:ceddefaults.blue. If you do this while CygnusEd is running on Q-Blue’s screen, it will also save the size and position of the editing window. Then, in your Q-Blue editor setup, make sure that the two filenames both end in “.blue” so this environment file will be automatically used. For example, the top gadget in the Editor setup window would contain the filename “RAM:Reply.blue”. Unfortunately, this feature may not always work reliably in older versions of CygnusEd. The Q-Blue feature which automatically adds a number to the end of the temporary filename when two processes are running at once is aware of this, and will put the added number before the period in the name so that it won’t interfere.

If you don’t plan to use the Ed activator program, you should make sure the Hot-start enabled option is off before saving the environment file, and for that matter leave it turned off in any other environment files too. In this case, your four editor setup strings should look something like this:

           RAM:Reply.blue

            RAM:Quotee.blue

    CED -pubscreen=@P @F

    CED -pubscreen=@P @O @F

If CED is not in your command path, you will of course need to use a complete pathname instead of just “CED” at the beginning. The “-pubscreen=@P” part makes it open its editing window on Q-Blue’s screen. This option is not available with version 2 of CygnusEd, and should be left out in that case. When the editing window is not on CygnusEd’s screen, Q-Blue’s After edit, screen to front feature is not very usable (and unfortunately, CygnusEd 2 is not able to push its own screen to the back either) but if you’re determined, it is possible to use it: add the “-keepio” option to the end of each command, make certain that Hot-start enabled is always turned off, and quit CygnusEd completely every time you finish editing a message. (If Q-Blue does not wake up when you finish editing, try pressing the return key while holding down the Ctrl, right Alt, and right shift keys.) Another possible approach would be to use the technique described in section 4.8, involving an ARexx script that waits for a message sent by a macro executed inside CygnusEd.

Editing a reply with this setup will cause a new CygnusEd window or screen to pop up containing either one view if writing an original message, or two if writing a reply. In the latter case, the message you are replying to will be in the upper view, with “>” or “XX>” markers added depending on your quote style setting. To use pieces of the original as quotes in the reply you are writing, select a marked block (by double-clicking and dragging the mouse, or with keyboard methods), copy it to the clipboard (Amiga-c), click on the spot in your reply where you want it to go, and paste (Amiga-v in new CygnusEd versions, Amiga-i in old ones). When you are done writing the reply, use the Save & quit command (shift-Amiga-Q) either once or twice, depending on how many views were opened.

If you use the CED command instead of the Ed activator, you might also want to set the environment in S:ceddefaults.blue to specify the same font that Q-Blue is using, especially if that is an IBM font and you read messages that sometimes contain IBM characters.

4.7) Using CygnusEd through the “Ed” activator

If you use the activator program instead, the effect is somewhat different. Whatever screen CygnusEd is using will pop to the front, and one or two new views will be created there. If any other files are already being edited there, the views created for Q-Blue’s files may be rather small and cramped. I recommend that the “hot-start” feature be turned on in this case. Also, the “-f” command option, or the “-o” option in older versions that don’t have “-f”, should be used. This takes care of cases where you edit your reply but don’t quit its view. The Ed command will replace the old, obsolete file still in the view with fresh information. The “-s” or “-sticky” option can also be helpful, but the only way that works is to combine it with “-f” into a single “-fs” option. The full commands would be:

           RAM:Reply.blue

            RAM:Quotee.blue

    Ed @F -fs

    Ed @O -f @F -fs

Q-Blue’s After edit, screen to front option can be set if “-fs” or “-sticky” is used. (But note that it is not fully reliable, at least in older versions; the “sticky” option may fail to work if CygnusEd is not already running or dormant.) Without this option, you may have to manually find Q-Blue’s screen when you’re done writing the reply. With older versions of CygnusEd (before v3.5), “-sticky” and “-o” cannot both be used, nor can -o be used on two filenames at once. This means that to edit two files with this option, you use two separate “Ed” commands separated by “@N”, and neither is able to use “-sticky”. With CygnusEd 2, the two editor commands (in the third and fourth editor setup string gadgets) that I would recommend are:

   Ed @F -o

    Ed @O -o @N Ed @F -o

Also, the Before edit, screen to back option may need to be used with CygnusEd 2, though it’s never needed with CygnusEd 3.5.

When you have finished writing your reply, you then need to save the result and ought to “quit” the view or views created by Q-Blue. This may be a bit cumbersome to do by hand if there are other views open, but it can be automated with the ARexx script below. But this script depends on certain global variables being set to contain the names of the two files being edited, which may not be exactly what you entered in Q-Blue, if you run more than one Q-Blue process. To set up these variables, you need to add “RxSet” commands to the two editor commands in the setup window:

RxSet QBlueReply @F @N RxSet QBlueOrig "" @N Ed @F -o

RxSet QBlueReply @F @N RxSet QBlueOrig @O @N Ed @O -f @F -fs

With those “RxSet” commands in place, this script will work:

/* Q-Blue-finish.ced: save and close Q-Blue file(s) */
options results
signal on error

'Jump to file' getclip('QBlueReply')
if RESULT == 0 then exit
Save
Quit
'Jump to file' getclip('QBlueOrig')
if RESULT ~= 0 then do
    Save
    Quit
end
CedToBack      /* REMOVE THIS LINE if "-pubscreen" is used! */
ERROR: exit

If you never run more than one copy of Q-Blue at once, you could simplify this. You could leave the “RxSet” commands out of the editor setup window, and just replace the two “getclip()” function calls in the script with the pathnames of the files, like this:

'Jump to file RAM:Reply.blue'

That script would be stored in the file REXX:Q-Blue-finish.ced, and you would probably use the Install DOS/ARexx command menu option to attach it to one of the ten function keys. If you don’t want the complexity of using two views to write replies, and just want to create your reply in the same view that the quoted original appears in, then fill in only the first gadget of each type in the Editor setup window, and leave the other two empty. Then the Q-Blue-finish.ced ARexx script given above will not be needed. The “CedToBack” command near the end is not necessary if the After edit, screen to front feature is working, and should definitely be removed if you’re using the “-pubscreen” option to edit on Q-Blue’s screen. It should also be removed for CygnusEd version 2, which does not support that command.

Note that the above script may possibly close the wrong views if you are also editing some other files with the same filename but a different directory path — CygnusEd does not distinguish them properly. One unfortunate side effect may be that a CON: window gets opened on the Workbench screen for no reason, which you can’t close! For this and several other reasons mentioned above, an up-to-date copy of CygnusEd will definitely work much more smoothly with Q-Blue. This leftover window happens even with version 3.5, actually, but since the window is “/AUTO” you don’t see it. This seems to happen when you use the above ARexx script after CygnusEd is started with CED instead of with Ed. The script should probably not be used in that case, at least not with old versions.

The Remove upper ascii and control characters gadget should be unchecked with CygnusEd.

4.8) Using TurboText to edit replies

If you don’t use the TurboText editor published by Oxxi, you can skip this section, which describes how to set up Q-Blue to use it.

With TurboText, unlike CygnusEd, you don’t have to make a choice between starting a new process and making use of an existing one; only the latter is possible. And although the TTX activator command has a “SCREEN” option which allows it to open an editing window on Q-Blue’s screen with a command such as “TTX RAM:Reply SCREEN @P”, this will not work if any TurboText window is open anywhere else — it can only use one screen. Because you would then have to manually dig through various screens under circumstances beyond Q-Blue’s control, I recommend against using the “SCREEN” option. (Anyway, TurboText windows tend to look a little funny when they open on Q-Blue’s screen, due to Q-Blue’s nonstandard assignment of Intuition window drawing pens.) For similar reasons, it may be impractical to tell TurboText to use a different font (e.g. an IBM font) with Q-Blue messages.

To cause the editing window(s) to have the right option settings, you should create a short ARexx script called Q-Blue-prefs.ttx in your REXX: directory, consisting only of TurboText commands to set various options. For example:

/* Q-Blue-prefs.ttx: set options for Q-Blue reply editing */
SetPrefs WordWrap ON
SetPrefs TabsGiveSpaces ON
SetPrefs SaveIcons OFF
SetPrefs RightMargin 74

And then refer to that file in the TTX command with the “MACRO” option, with a command such as “TTX @F MACRO Q-Blue-prefs”. Depending on what your normal settings are in TurboText, some of those option lines may be unnecessary. If only one or two options are needed, you can include them right in the command instead of putting them in a separate script, by enclosing the ARexx statements in both double and single quotes and separating them with semicolons, in place of the filename after the word “MACRO”, like this:

TTX @F MACRO "'SetPrefs RightMargin 74; SetPrefs WordWrap ON'"

I recommend using the “WAIT” option as well, which will prevent the TTX command from finishing (and Q-Blue from coming back to life) until all file(s) loaded by it have been closed again. This allows Q-Blue’s After edit, screen to front feature to work, and avoids the problem of old reply files being left in the editor, which TurboText can’t resolve as easily as CygnusEd can, with its “-f” option for the Ed activator. So, the complete commands you would set up for TurboText would be:

           RAM:Reply

            RAM:Quotee

    TTX @F WAIT MACRO Q-Blue-prefs

    TTX @O @F WAIT MACRO Q-Blue-prefs

After edit, screen to front should be turned on, unless you do not use the “WAIT” option. Before edit, screen to back should be turned off. Remove upper ascii and control characters should also be turned off. Unless you are pinched for memory, I recommend that TurboText be left resident in memory between uses. This can be accomplished by including the word “BACKGROUND” or “BG” in the TTX commands, or adding a line to Q-Blue-prefs.ttx (the script named after “MACRO” in the commands) that says “SetBackground ON”, or by running TurboText that way before Q-Blue ever uses it.

When you write a new message, whatever screen TurboText’s windows are on will pop to the front, with a new window open to write your reply in. If you write a reply, two windows will open, with the window for your reply in front. The window containing the quoted text of the message you are replying to will be right behind it. By bringing that other window to the front, you can copy sections of it into your reply using the clipboard: double-click the mouse and drag it over the region you want to include (or use keyboard methods to mark a block), use the Copy command (right-Amiga-C), bring back the reply window (you can use right-Amiga-0 to switch quickly between the two), click where the stuff should go, and use Paste (right-Amiga-V). If you do not want to hassle with two windows, and just want to create your reply in the same window that starts out containing the quoted original message, then just fill in the top gadgets of each type in the Editor setup window as given above, and leave the bottom string in each pair empty.

When you finish writing the reply, use the Save (right-Amiga-S) and Close Window (right-Amiga-Q, or the close gadget) commands in each window that Q-Blue opened. If there are two windows, this may be somewhat inconvenient, and as with CygnusEd, an ARexx macro can automate this. But as with CygnusEd, the script won’t work properly unless you modify the second command in the Editor setup window to include a “RxSet” command, like this:

RxSet QBlueOrig @O @N TTX @O @F WAIT MACRO Q-Blue-prefs

You would invoke this script while the window containing your reply is the active one:

/* Q-Blue-finish.ttx: save and close Q-Blue file(s) */
options results
signal on error

SaveFile NoIcon
CloseDoc
address TURBOTEXT GetPort getclip('QBlueOrig')
if RC == 0 then do
    address value RESULT
    SaveFile NoIcon
    CloseDoc
end
Screen2Back    /* REMOVE this line if "SCREEN" option used! */
ERROR: exit

The “Screen2Back” command is not needed if Q-Blue’s After edit, screen to front feature is working, but may be needed if you don’t use the “WAIT” option in the TTX commands. That line must be removed if you run TurboText on Q-Blue’s screen. You would presumably attach this script to some key with a line in the “KEYBOARD:” section of the definition file TTX_Startup.dfn. For example, to execute this script by pressing the F10 key, you could add the following lines to the definition file:

KEYBOARD: APPEND
F10 ExecARexxMacro Q-Blue-finish
#

Note that this script may fail to work if there is any other window open with the same name, not counting the directory path, as the second file in your Editor setup window. For instance, editing a file named Work:stuff/Quotee in another window might cause this script to close that window instead of the one containing RAM:Quotee, just because TurboText doesn’t bother to tell the difference. If this becomes a problem, just pick a more unusual filename to use in Q-Blue’s setup.

One trick that may help make editing with two windows more convenient is to make use of the ARexx script WindowOrg.ttx that is supplied with TurboText. To do this, add the following lines to the end of the script Q-Blue-prefs.ttx, after the various “SetPrefs” lines:

options results
GetFileInfo
origname = '"' || upper(getclip('QBlueOrig')) || '"'
if upper(word(RESULT, 3)) == origname then call 'WindowOrg'

As with the Q-Blue-finish.ttx script, this depends on the presence of the “RxSet” command in the Editor setup window’s second command string. The effect will be that when Q-Blue loads two files into TurboText, the windows will arrange themselves so they each cover half of the screen, not overlapping. But it probably won’t work if other files are also loaded.

4.9) A few editor tricks

One slightly tricky point with some editors, such as Uedit, is that since it saves files as a background operation, you may end up telling Q-Blue to save the reply before the editor has finished writing it out. This will cause Q-Blue to display an error message saying that it could not find the file. If this happens, just close the error requester and tell it to save again. If that was the problem, the second attempt will succeed.

An odd trick, probably useless: you can use two editor commands even if you specify only one filename. This might be of use if you want the editor to treat that file in two different ways depending on whether it contains quoted text to be replied to or not. The second command will be used when loading the editor with quoted material, and the first will be used when re-editing text you have written yourself, or when starting with an empty file.

You can, if necessary, cause an ARexx script to wait for the editor to finish with the file before returning, so that Q-Blue’s After edit, screen to front screen pop-up feature can work at the right time. This requires creating a named port in your script, and then, as part of the command you use when finishing a message in the editor (presumably a macro), sending a message to that port. Here is an example of a partial script that does this, which can be added to the end of an ordinary editor script that is called by a RX command in the Editor setup window:

/* rexxsupport.library must be already opened here: */
pname = 'Q-Blue-wait'                /* use any unique name */
if ~openport(pname) then exit 20

call waitpkt pname
pak = getpkt(pname)
if pak ~== '00000000'x then call reply(pak, 0)

In this case, you would set up an editor macro to be used when you finish editing a message, which would save the file and close its editing window or view or buffer, and finally, execute this ARexx command:

address 'Q-Blue-wait' 'x'

You can use anything in place of “x”. As soon as the “x” message is received, Q-Blue’s screen will pop to the front. If something goes wrong and the message doesn’t get sent, you can cause the ARexx script to exit, and allow Q-Blue to wake up, by entering the “HI” (Halt Interpreter) command supplied with ARexx at a CLI prompt.

5) SETTING UP COMPRESSOR COMMANDS

5.1) The Compressors setup window

The Compressors window is one of the most complex of the setup windows to work with, but with any luck you may not have to mess with it at all. By default, Q-Blue is set up to handle five types of compression: Zip, LHA, LZX, Zoo, and Arc. Zip compression is further divided into “Zip 2.x” and “Zip 1.x” types, the latter being used for BBSes that have outdated unzipping software. If you have the necessary programs for these, you should be able to use the default settings. They assume that you have the following programs: LhA by Stefan Boberg for LZH and LHA compression (note that the old Lharc program cannot handle LHA, which is what many mail doors will give you if you ask for LZH); UnZip 5.0 or higher from the Info-Zip group (of which I am a member); Zip from the same group, preferably version 2.0 or higher; Zoo by Rahul Dhesi, preferably version 2.1 or higher; Arc 0.23 by Raymond S. Brand; and LZX by Jonathan Forbes and Tomi Poutanen. If these programs are in your command path (they would typically be in your C: directory), your compressor configuration won’t need any changes for these compression types. If any are not present, that only means you cannot use that particular type of archive compression.

Zoo and Arc are not used much any more, so you may never need these at all. Conversely, LZX is a recent product that never came into very wide use. Zip and UnZip are by far the most commonly used, and may be your only choice with some BBSes, so you’d better have these. If you need to add another type (such as perhaps ARJ), or use a different program for one of these types (such as LZ by Johnathan Forbes in place of LhA), then read the following. You should also read section 5.2 if you are using a configuration left over from an older version of Q-Blue.

The window titled Compression methods for packing and unpacking files can be opened by pressing Alt-C or selecting Compressors from the Setup menu. There are eight buttons in the top part of the window. Each represents a different compression method. Normally there are fewer than eight compression methods installed, and the rest of the gadgets are blank and ghosted. Below these are a bunch of string gadgets which are blank and ghosted until you select a particular method. At the right edge, midway down the window, is a gadget labeled Add. If you want to put in a new method, click this gadget or press the A key. If you want to edit the definition of an existing method, or delete it, click on the button that is labeled with the name of the method you want to edit, or press the digit key that is shown next to the gadget (1 to 8). If you select an existing method, its gadget will stay selected and the remaining gadgets in the lower part of the window will become active, showing the existing definition. If you use the Add command, the first unused gadget in the top group of eight will un-ghost and become selected, and the bottom gadgets will become active with nothing in them. You can’t add a new method if all eight gadgets are already defined.

The definition consists of four parts: First, in a small string gadget midway down the left side of the window, is the name of the method. This is the name that shows in the appropriate gadget in the upper part, and is shown in the checkmarked submenu that is used to pick which method you actually want to use. It tries to activate this gadget for typing when you select a method to edit. It holds a maximum of seven characters; one would normally put a simple, easily recognized name here, such as “ARJ” or “Stuffit”. (I have not yet seen Amiga compression programs for either of these methods, though decompressors exist.) The two large string gadgets below are used for specifying the commands used for compression and decompression. The string gadget labeled Pattern, to the right of the name, is used for recognizing whether a given packet has been compressed with this method.

If you want to delete a compression method from the available set, select the appropriate gadget and then erase the contents of all four string gadgets. When you un-select it or close the window, it will be removed and you will have one fewer compressor to choose from. Never remove the last one — there must always be one valid compressor. It won’t let you close the window if any definition is incomplete, or if there is not at least one valid definition. A complete definition must have a name, a compression command, and a decompression command — the pattern may be blank. It also will not let you close the window if one of the pattern strings (explained in section 5.4) has invalid characters in it. If you fill in one or two parts of a compression method, and another part is still blank, it will demand that you either finish the partial definition or erase it, before you close the window. It will put up a requester telling you which one is incomplete. If a pattern is invalid, it will first put up a requester, and then when the error requester is closed it will select the offending archiver and attempt to activate the pattern gadget with the cursor at the point where the invalid character was detected.

Note: if you want to specify a method that has a decompression command but no compression command (for instance if you have downloaded a packet in .ARJ form or something, and have only a decompressor on hand), then just put “Quit 10” in the compression command gadget. This will cause an error message if you try to compress replies with this method.

5.2) Teaching Q-Blue about other compression programs

In the two large string gadgets at the bottom of the Compressors setup window, you enter the actual commands as you would type them at a CLI prompt, except that you do not enter the literal name of the archive file to be created or unpacked — instead, type “@A” where the archive name would go. For example, the default Zip decompression command is “UnZip -o @A”. Likewise, if you need to include the name of the directory the uncompressed files go in, you enter “@D” in its place. (“@D” is no longer used in any of the default commands.) Q-Blue will replace “@A” and “@D” with the appropriate pathnames when executing the command. Q-Blue uses your command path setting when executing these commands, just as it does with editor commands (section 4.2 has details on how it determines the path to use). To use compression programs that are not in your command path, you’ll have to use an explicit pathname for the compression program. The command for packing replies goes into the bottommost gadget, which is labeled Compression command, and the one above it, labeled Decompression command, contains the command for unpacking mail.

In general, when specifying a compression command, give one that will archive all files in the current directory, or the directory named with “@D”. The directory that “@D” specified to is always the current directory when the command runs, so it is usually not necessary to include the “@D” code explicitly. Although QWK replies typically use only one file, Blue Wave replies require many files, and Q-Blue uses the same command for both cases (though you can create variations with “@B” and “@Q”). If the archiver allows wildcards, you can use the all-files wildcard, as in the default LHA compression command, “LhA -0 a @A #?”.

If your archiving program does not let you use wildcards to tell it what files to compress, you can use the “@F” code instead. This code is replaced with a list of all the filenames in the current directory (the “@D” directory). The default Zip command used this code in Q-Blue 2.1, because old versions of Zip do not support wildcards. The command “Zip -k @A @F” would give Zip an explicit list of every file to be compressed. For example, if your replies directory contains the files somebbs.upl, 23.001, and 14.002, which are to be compressed into up:somebbs.new, then the actual command executed by Q-Blue, after the codes are replaced, would be “Zip -k up:somebbs.new 23.001 14.002 somebbs.upl”.

In Q-Blue 2.3 the default Zip command was changed back to use the wildcard “*” instead of “@F”, because some users reported that a command using “@F” was not able to compress more than 28 Blue Wave replies. (On most systems this problem hopefully should not occur.) If you have a very old version of Zip that does not understand the “*” wildcard, you may have to replace it with “@F”.

It is also possible to use some command that tells it to gather all files within a named directory: for example, the default Zip command in very old versions of Q-Blue, “Zip -jkr @A @D”, used this approach. Note that in this case, it will not only include all of the files in the replies directory, but all those within any subdirectories as well. This can be a problem if any subdirectories exist in your replies directory. It is best not to create any such.

Here is a table of the current default commands, listing first the decompression and then the compression command for each. In most circumstances, the different ones used in old Q-Blue versions will still work and do not really need to be modified if you don’t want to take the trouble.

1) Zip 2.x:	4) LZX:
UnZip -jo @A	LZX -m -X0 x @A
Zip -k @A *	LZX -X0 a @A #?
2) Zip 1.x:	5) Zoo:
UnZip -jo @A	Zoo xSO @A
Zip -0k @A *	Zoo a @A *
3) LHA:	6) Arc:
LhA -m -x0 x @A	Arc xw @A
LhA -0 a @A #?	Arc a @A #?

When specifying a decompression command, you should generally use whatever option is provided to make it do the decompression without ever stopping to ask the user for input. It is usually best to also tell the decompression command to restore everything to the current directory instead of preserving any subdirectory paths. One change between the default commands of Q-Blue 2.2 and those of older versions is that previously, the Zip and LHA decompression commands did not suppress subdirectories. An option to strip subdirectory paths is especially important in compression commands if “@D” is used. You should make sure that the files are stored as plain filenames with no directory paths. All of the default commands meet these criteria, except that LZX extraction preserves paths, because the no-path option did not work on the early copy I have.

If you wish to use the program LZ by Johnathan Forbes instead of LhA by Stefan Boberg, simply edit the two commands for compression type LHA so that the command name is “LZ” instead of “LhA” — the rest of each command after the name can be left unchanged. You may wish to add the “-n” option to your LhA or LZ commands, which turns off the feature that tells you from moment to moment how far it has progressed in compressing or decompressing each file, because on some systems this option can slow down the program noticeably. The “-x” option should not be used for compression. Early versions of Q-Blue used LZ by default.

Sometimes the “-0” option has to be used with Zip compression, if you have Zip version 1.9 or newer. (That’s a zero, not a letter O, after the hyphen.) This is necessary if the BBS is unpacking archives with an old unzipper, or with some software such as the QSO mail packer incorporated into TBBS, or the similar QWK packer used in MajorBBS, which as of this writing can unpack old-style Zip archives but not those compatible with Zip 2.0. With Zip, “-0” causes files to be stored with no compression at all. It makes for a bigger reply packet, but since reply uploads are generally much smaller than mail downloads, the penalty is not very large, and the compression features of modern modems may make the upload just as quick. Q-Blue 2.4 has a separate “Zip 1.x” compression type which uses the “-0” option automatically, if the download packet appears to have been made with an obsolete type of Zip compression. If you have a very old version of Zip, such as v0.93, you can use it without “-0” and delete the extra “Zip 1.x” compression method... but note that those old versions have bugs.

If a reply packet already exists with the same name as the one that the compression command is trying to create, Q-Blue may rename it so that you have a backup copy of your previous reply packet — the details are in section 11.6. After the command runs, Q-Blue will check whether the expected new archive now exists, and put up an error message to let you know if it is empty or nonexistent.

5.3) Special codes in compression commands

This section covers the complete set of special codes available in compressor commands. As mentioned above, wherever “@A” is found in a compression command, Q-Blue substitutes the name of the archive file that is being created (in the case of compression) or unpacked (in the case of decompression). Archives being created are always located in your uploads directory, and Q-Blue appends the correct filename onto the uploads path you give in the Directories setup window to produce the pathname used for “@A”. Archives being unpacked may be in either the uploads or the downloads directory, or anywhere at all if the ASL requester is used to select a file to open.

Q-Blue replaces “@D” with either the name of the directory that files are to be unpacked into, or the directory that files to be packed are in. In the case of decompression, this may be either your work directory or your replies directory. When compressing, it is always the replies directory.

As described in the previous section, “@F” is replaced with a complete list of the names of all files in the current directory, which is the same directory that “@D” specifies. This is useful with compressors that expect a list of files to be compressed. In Q-Blue 1.0 and older, the @F code was useful only for QWK replies consisting of just one file. It can still be used for this purpose. The files are listed as simple names with no path information, with spaces in between. @F produces an error message if used in a decompression command. Also note that the same code is used for a different purpose in editor commands.

The directory name inserted in place of “@D” will always have a colon or slash on the end, so that a decompression command can know it is a directory and not the name of a file within the archive being decompressed, and a compression command can use forms like “@D#?” without worrying about whether or not a slash needs to go between the directory name and the wildcards. Any file or directory pathname inserted with any of these codes will have quote marks around it if it contains space characters, so you should not include explicit quote marks in the commands you enter.

As with the commands in the Editor setup window (see section 4.2), if there is a part of the command that you wish to be included only when dealing with a QWK format packet, you can put that part between a pair of “@Q” sequences, and likewise any part between two “@B” sequences will be ignored except when dealing with a Blue Wave packet. Note that this is not entirely reliable with decompression commands, because when it is unpacking a mail archive, it doesn’t know yet what the packet contains, so it can’t be sure whether it’s a QWK packet, a Blue Wave packet, or neither. It can only judge by the name of the file being unpacked, and if it doesn’t look like either type, it will assume it is QWK until after the unpacking is finished and it reads the contents in the work directory. Files with extensions consisting of three digits, like SOMENAME.001, are assumed to be Blue Wave, though some QWK doors might also be able to produce such names.

The “@N” code can be used, just as in editor commands, to separate two commands to be executed in sequence. It becomes a newline in the command that is executed. The “@P” and “@S” codes can be used also, but they are generally of value only in editor commands; section 4.2 explains their use. The special sequences recognized in both editor and compressor commands are “@B”, “@Q”, “@P”, “@S”, and “@N”. The sequence “@F” is usable in both editor and compressor commands, but has a different meaning in the two situations. The sequences that work only in compression commands are “@A”, “@D”, and “@U”. Any other character after an “@” is included as is, after discarding the at-sign. Thus, “@@” becomes one at-sign in the command that is executed. The letters can be upper or lower case.

“@U” is rarely useful. It is replaced with the pathname of the directory where the compressed packet belongs — your uploads directory when compressing, or it may be your downloads directory if used in a decompression command. In other words, “@U” is the parent directory of “@A”. One case where it can be used is with the public domain StorMail command. For those who do not have a proper Zip compressor, StorMail will create a Zip archive with no compression. It is very limited — it will only store a file named somename.MSG into an archive named somename.REP. This means that it can only be used for QWK replies and is useless for Blue Wave. To use StorMail, the correct compression command is “StorMail @F to @U”. But StorMail will fail if there is more than one file in your replies directory, or even if the one file there does not have a name ending in “.MSG”.

5.4) Compressor “patterns” for automatic recognition

The “compressor pattern” feature is something has been imitated in other mail readers because it allows adoption of future compression methods without any loss of convenience. (They were called “signatures” in previous Q-Blue versions, but the name was change to avoid confusion when the Signature feature was added to the Replying setup window.) In order to recognize what compressor to use for unpacking a given packet, Q-Blue needs to know something about what it can expect to find in a file produced by that compressor. The text in the Pattern gadget fills that purpose. That text consists only of pairs of hexadecimal digits, or question marks, separated optionally by spaces. Each question mark or pair of digits represents one byte in the file being checked, starting with the very first byte. If each pair of hex digits specifies the same byte value that actually appears at that place in the file, then the file matches the pattern and Q-Blue figures that this must be the right compressor to use. Where a question mark is given, the corresponding byte in the file may have any value.

If two patterns both match, Q-Blue selects the longer one. This is often the case with the two default compression types labeled “Zip 2.x” and “Zip 1.x” — the pattern used by the latter is the same as that of the former, with one byte added at the end. Any archive that fits the longer signature will also fit the shorter one, but Zip 2.x will be selected only if the archive fails to match the extra byte of Zip 1.x’s longer pattern. In past releases, v2.1 and older, Q-Blue had only one Zip compression entry and would not recognize packets that required 1.x-compatible compression.

This method of recognizing compression types is not completely reliable for some types. Zip and Zoo archives are always recognizable, LHA should be dependable, but Arc may sometimes fail to be recognized. Also, Zip 2.x archives may be mistaken for Zip 1.x, if the first entry is a directory name or a non-compressed file. But accidentally using 1.x in place of 2.x causes no great trouble, whereas to accidentally use 2.x in place of 1.x may produce an upload packet that the BBS cannot unpack. Q-Blue’s default pattern settings for Zip are based on a policy of “better safe than sorry”.

Any compressor may have a blank pattern. In this case, whenever you want to open a packet with this compression type, you’ll have to select it manually. If a pattern is defined and this tells it that the compressor it should use is not the one currently selected, it gives you a choice of whether to switch or not. See section 8 on opening packets for details.

Figuring out a pattern for a new compression type is sometimes a matter of guesswork. You have to make a hexadecimal dump of several archives compressed with that method with “Type Hex” or a similar command, and look for bytes near the beginnings of the files that always have the same values in the same locations. If you’re unlucky, there just may not be any such bytes. But usually some of the first few bytes have consistent values. When you find those bytes, copy down their hexadecimal values, and fill in question marks in place of any bytes before them which have differing values, and put the result in the pattern gadget for that compression type. With a little luck, Q-Blue will then automatically recognize any packet compressed that way. You’re limited to about the first 150 bytes in the file for finding a pattern. Usually if it isn’t in the first dozen bytes it’s not to be found.

The patterns for the default compression methods are as follows:

for Zip 2.x:	50 4B 03 04
for Zip 1.x:	50 4B 03 04 0A
for LHA:	? ? 2D 6C 68 ? 2D
for LZX:	4C 5A 58
for Zoo:	5A 4F 4F 20
for Arc:	1A

In some older releases, “1A 08” was used for Arc, but this did not always work. A pattern of “60 EA” ought to work for ARJ.

6) OTHER CONFIGURATION OPTIONS

6.1) Selecting the font for Q-Blue’s screen

At the top of the setup window titled Font and screen specifications are a row of three gadgets which are used for telling Q-Blue what font to use to display messages. Below that are two gadgets for selecting the type of custom screen to open, and a command button for reopening the screen using those new settings. Below those are gadgets for adjusting the screen’s colors, similar to those found in various palette requesters or the Palette preferences editor.

A font can by selected by either of two methods: with the ASL font requester, or by editing string gadgets. The command gadget labeled Font: in the upper left corner of the Font & Screen setup window will pop up the ASL font requester. You can also select a font by editing the two string gadgets to the right of this command button, labeled Name and Height. If the requester is used, it will insert the name and point size of the font you select into the two string gadgets.

The Name string gadget just to the right of the Font gadget shows the name of a font in your system FONTS: directory, which can be specified with or without the “.font” ending on the name. Pressing the tab key will activate this gadget. It can be edited manually, as well as being set by the ASL font requester. For example, you might enter “newcleanibm.font” here. The default if this gadget is blank is to use the System Default Text font you have selected in the Font Preferences program, or topaz 8 if that does not fit Q-Blue’s screen. The Height: numeric gadget to its right specifies the point size of the font — the height of each character in pixels. The font you select here will be used for almost everything in Q-Blue, except menus and window titles, which use the system default font.

The font you choose must meet specific requirements. It must be non-proportional — that is, all characters the same width; it can be no less than 8 and no more than 32 pixels tall; the width must be no less than 5 and no more than 16 pixels; and it must specify all normal ASCII characters (hex values 20 through 7E). Q-Blue rejects “scaled” fonts that the system makes by stretching other bitmap fonts larger or smaller (they usually look awful), but a outline font like LetterGothic 18 is okay. The majority of users would probably get best results with a font which shows the IBM character set, instead of the 8 bit ISO character set normally used by the Amiga. This character set is the de facto standard in most BBS mail. Many fonts using the IBM character set are available. The Q-Blue distribution includes several. Section 2.1 describes them and gives information on installing these fonts for Q-Blue to use — basically, all you have to do is double-click the Install icon and answer the requesters.

In general, I recommend using the included newcleanibm font (size 8) if you use a basic noninterlaced NTSC or PAL screen, tallibm (size 11, 12, or 14) with an interlaced or other double-height screen, and wideibm (size 9, 12, or 14) for 800 by 600 pixel screen modes which are not available on older Amigas. It is entirely a matter of taste which height you choose; the width is the crucial measurement needed to fit the font to Q-Blue’s screen. The stretchibm font (size 12) is intended for those who use NTSC or PAL screens with extreme horizontal overscan, making them 720 pixels wide. If you don’t want to use the IBM character set, I recommend topaz 8 for noninterlace, topaz 11 or talliso for interlace, topaz 9 or wideisostretchiso for 720 pixel overscan.

If you enter an invalid height number (under 8 or over 32), the gadget will be reactivated with the previous value in it. If you select a font which Q-Blue cannot use, a requester will appear warning you of the problem, but it will not forbid you from leaving the invalid selection in your setup, because it can always fall back on using topaz 8.

The font you select will not be used immediately. In order to see your new font, you have to reopen Q-Blue’s screen. This can be done by using the Iconify screen command in the Packet menu, described fully in section 8.1, or by using the Open! gadget below the font height gadget, which is described in the next section. If the specified font cannot be used, an error requester will appear on the Workbench screen (or default public screen) and when that is closed, Q-Blue will open its screen using your system default font, or topaz 8.

Below the font gadgets is a line of text that tells you the width of the currently specified font, and how wide a screen you will need to see everything when using it. Because BBS messages are almost always formatted to fit within a display 80 text characters wide, Q-Blue always opens an Intuition screen with a width equal to 80 times the width of the font it’s using, plus (if there’s room) a vertical scrollbar. This may be narrower or wider than the visible width of the display, which is controlled by your preferences overscan settings. This line might read, for example:

Font width = 8 pixels; screen width needed = 640

This lets you know what size of screen you should open so that the physical display and the Intuition screen width will fit each other. In this case, you would avoid using a screen size such as 800 by 600 or 1280 by 512, because a large portion of the display area would be unused. Similarly, if you use a font 10 pixels wide, such as topaz 9 or wideibm 12, so that it says “screen width needed = 800”, you would not want to use a basic NTSC or PAL screen, because not everything would be visible at once. In a case like this, Q-Blue will turn on the screen’s autoscroll feature, so that if you slide the mouse pointer into the area that doesn’t show, it will scroll to show it. If you use the screen mode requester as described in the next section, you can manually select whether autoscroll is used.

6.2) Selecting the screen type

Below the font selection gadgets in the Font & Screen setup window is a cycle gadget labeled Screen colors and type. This gadget has five options: 4 NoLace, 4 Lace, 8 NoLace, 8 Lace, and Custom. Each time you click on it, it changes to a different one of the five settings. Its keyboard equivalent is the letter S. The default setting is 8 NoLace. The first four settings let you select basic screen types using your system’s default monitor type (usually NTSC or PAL). The Custom setting lets you use an arbitrary display type chosen with the ASL screen mode requester. The other options are provided for simplicity, and for systems that do not have a working screen mode requester, such as systems using AmigaDOS 2.04, in which asl.library does not include this requester.

The number 4 or 8 is the number of colors that Q-Blue’s screen will use. An eight color screen is generally nicer to look at, but the four color screen, though drabber in appearance, has the advantage of using less chip ram and updating more quickly. On Amigas with pre-AGA display hardware, using a four color screen can double the speed of many display operations. On Amigas without true fast memory, everything will speed up. The Lace vs. NoLace choice chooses whether the screen will be interlaced for double the default vertical resolution, allowing you to read twice as much text on the screen at any one time, or use a larger and more readable font such as tallibm 14. But if you have pre-AGA display hardware and no deinterlacer, it will cause the image to flicker. It will also use more chip ram if interlace is used, and slow down text scrolling. The default is no interlace.

Below the cycle gadget is a command button labeled Mode:, which is ghosted except when the cycle gadget is set to Custom. To the right of that gadget is displayed the name of the currently selected custom screen mode. If you click the Mode: button or press the M key, the ASL screen mode requester will pop up, if it is available in your system. It will let you select any other Workbench-compatible custom display mode from a scrolling list, and also give you a slider gadget for selecting how many colors the screen should use (4 and 8 are the only choices) and a checkbox for turning on the autoscroll feature. When you close the requester by selecting OK, the new name will be displayed to the right of the button, along with some information about the size of the screen this mode will create, for example:

MULTISCAN:Productivity Lace   (640 x 960 x 4)

The first two numbers in the parentheses are the nominal width and height of the screen in this display mode, in this case 640 pixels wide and 960 pixels tall. The actual width and height may be slightly larger, depending on your overscan settings, but it will never be smaller. The third number is the number of colors it will use, either 4 or 8. You should generally select a screen mode for which the first number matches the necessary screen width number displayed below the font gadgets. With basic NTSC or PAL video modes, however, it is possible to stretch the screen to 720 pixels wide if you use extreme overscan; in this case a font 9 pixels wide instead of 8 (such as courier 15 or stretchibm 12) can be used. This text will be ghosted, like the Mode: button, when the screen type setting is not Custom. As with the font setting, a change of the screen settings does not take effect until you close and reopen Q-Blue’s screen, or save the configuration and restart Q-Blue. Most other option choices, including palette changes done with the gadgets in the bottom part of this window, take immediate effect. Closing and reopening the screen can be done using the Iconify screen command described in section 8.1, but there’s a shortcut provided here. To the right of the screen type cycle gadget is a command button labeled Open!. When you click this or press the O key, Q-Blue will put the new font and screen settings to immediate use. It will close the window and then close the screen, and reopen the screen with the new settings. If the screen fails to open, for instance because there is not enough chip ram available, Q-Blue will be iconified (see section 8.1). You can un-iconify it when it’s again possible for the screen to open, for example when you have freed up some memory. If the selected screen mode doesn’t work, it will use the default NTSC or PAL display mode.

If your overscan preferences for the selected screen mode allow an extra 16 or more horizontal pixels beyond the nominal size, Q-Blue will open a slightly wider screen in order to include a scroll gadget along the right edge.

The remainder of the window is occupied by palette control gadgets. There is a color selection gadget on the left, which lets you pick one of the four or eight colors so you can modify it. It has a swatch of each color in it, and you can either click on the color you want to change, or move the current selection from one color to another with the arrow keys. To the right of that is a “recessed” swatch showing a sample of the currently selected color. Below that is a command button labeled Undo. On the right are three slider gadgets labeled Red, Green, and Blue. With them you can adjust the color values that make up the currently selected color. They can be adjusted by keyboard: press R, G, or B to increase the value of the corresponding slider, or press it with the shift key held down to decrease the value. The current numeric values are shown to the right of each slider. Clicking Undo, or pressing U, undoes all color changes made since the window was opened.

Color changes, unlike font or screen mode changes, take immediate effect. However, you cannot adjust the colors used on four color screens while an eight color screen is open, or vice versa. The two palettes are separate, and both are remembered in the configuration file when you use Save setup.

6.3) The Options setup window

The Miscellaneous preference options setup window can be opened with the Options item in the Setup menu, or with the keystroke Alt-O. It contains nothing but checkmark gadgets, in two columns. Each has a descriptive label to its right, with the first letter of that label underlined. Click on the gadget to switch the checkmark on or off, or type the underlined letter to the right of the gadget for the same effect. When the checkmark is present, the option described in the label is turned on.

The top gadget on the left is labeled Page break after printing, with the letter P as its keyboard shortcut. When this is checked (the default), any message sent to the printer will be followed by a formfeed character to send the printer to the start of a new page. Otherwise it puts three blank lines after the text. (Older versions of Q-Blue only put two blank lines.)

To the right of the page break gadget is one labeled Waste memory for speed, with keyboard shortcut W. When this is checked, it causes the text of some messages to be cached in memory instead of loaded from disk each time they come up onscreen. Specifically, Q-Blue attempts to preload the text of the next 20 messages after the one you are currently reading, so that you can quickly move through them all without waiting for disk access. It will “forget” the cached messages if you do something that needs memory to be conserved, such as packing replies or iconifying the screen. If your work directory is in ram disk, there will be no significant benefit in using this. By default it is turned off.

The second gadget on the left side, under the Page break after printing gadget, is labeled Msgs: list before reading, shortcut M. It is turned off (unchecked) by default. It causes the window listing messages in the current area to be automatically opened whenever you choose a new area. If you consider this to be an unnecessary extra step, you can leave this gadget unchecked and when you choose an area it will simply display that area’s first message, or the last one you read if you have already been in this area before. This option also causes the message list window to be opened when you do a word search in the current area (see section 9.5).

To the right of that, under the Waste memory for speed gadget, is one labeled Your msgs flash screen, shortcut Y, which is unchecked by default. It determines whether the screen will flash when a message addressed to you is displayed. This is commonly called a display “beep”, and may produce a sound if you use a program or preferences setting which translate such flashes into actual beeps.

The third gadget on the left side is Areas: list before reading, shortcut A, which is turned on by default. It is analogous to the Msgs: list before reading gadget immediately above it. It causes the window listing areas with messages in them to be opened whenever you try to read the next message in an area where you are at the last message, or the previous message when you are at the first. The default area highlighted in the window will be the one after (or before, if you asked for the previous message) the one you were in. If this option is unchecked, it will simply display the first, or last-shown, message in the next (or previous) area without opening the areas window. It will still open the window when you reach the end (or beginning) of all available messages. This setting also causes the window to be opened after doing a word search of all areas.

To the right of that is Update behind list window, shortcut U, which is on by default. Q-Blue has a feature that some people might consider annoyingly flashy: when the window which lists the messages in the current area is open, moving the highlight bar up and down causes the indicated message to be immediately displayed on the main screen behind the window. If you hold down the arrow key so it repeats, or press it rapidly, the background display will get rather noisy as it repeatedly starts displaying a new message, and then abandons the effort part way through to start on another one. None of the messages displayed this way are counted as having actually been read. If you turn off the checkmark here, the background will remain static until you close the list window.

The fourth gadget on the left side is Buttons at screen bottom, shortcut B. This is checked by default, and when it’s turned off, the row of seven command buttons at the bottom of the screen disappears. This allows more of the text in the message body to be seen at once. The amount of increase may be two text lines or just one line, depending on the font size and screen height. The first five of those gadgets are all just shortcuts for equivalent menu items, and so are really just a small convenience. The last two, labeled Prev. and Next, have no menu equivalents; with the gadgets turned off, there is no mouse equivalent to pressing the left or right arrow key.

To the right of that is one labeled "Re:" before reply subject. Its shortcut is R and it is checked by default. When it is turned off, then when you reply to a message the subject, or title, of your reply is by default the same as that of the message you are replying to. When it’s checked, the reply’s subject is the original’s with “Re:” stuck in front, to indicate that it is a reply to someone else’s statement. For instance, if the original subject was “Amigas are neato”, the reply would be titled “Re: Amigas are neato” by default.

The fifth one on the left is labeled Next string gad activates, key shortcut N. It controls the behavior of string gadgets, which was described in section 1.3: if this is on (it is, by default), then whenever a window contains several string gadgets, pressing return in one string gadget will automatically activate the next one below it. Pressing shift-return will activate the one above, and pressing Alt-return will not activate either. When this gadget is off, pressing return or shift-return never activates another string gadget.

The fifth gadget on the right is Option to delete packet, shortcut O. When this is checked, Q-Blue will ask you with a requester, when you close the packet, whether the mail packet file that you opened should be deleted. The requester will mention how many, if any, of the messages in the packet have not been read. It is off by default.

The sixth gadget on the left is Sizes in message list, shortcut S. When this is checked, the window listing messages in the current area will show the approximate length of the message in bytes instead of the message’s index number. (With QWK mail the number is rounded up to a multiple of 128.) It is off by default.

The sixth gadget on the right is Flush reply dir at close, shortcut F. If this is checked, Q-Blue will delete the files in the reply directory when you close the packet, if they have been packed with no problems. This may help reduce confusion in cases where you have a choice between unpacking a reply archive and reloading replies left in that directory. It is off by default.

The last gadget, across the bottom of both columns, is Hidden scroll bar pops up when mouse at right edge of screen. This option has no effect if Q-Blue’s screen is overscanned by at least 16 pixels above standard width. With this extra width available, Q-Blue always shows a vertical scrollbar along the right hand edge of the message text area. But if the screen is exactly 640 pixels wide (or 80 times the width of the font you select), no scrollbar is visible. But if this option is checked, a scrollbar will appear whenever you move the mouse to the right edge of the screen, slightly reducing the area available to display text. You can move the mouse to the right to use the scrollbar, then move it back to the left to uncover any text that was hidden by it.

6.4) Specifying how messages are quoted for replying

The Replying setup window is opened by selecting Replying in the Setup menu, or pressing Alt-Y. It is titled Options for writing messages and replies, and it contains gadgets which are mostly concerned with two aspects of writing replies: quoting from the original message you are replying to, and adding taglines.

At the top left is a cycle gadget labeled Quote style default, with five values and the keyboard shortcut Q. It is used to set the default style for quoting lines from a message that you are replying to. You can change the style for any one message, if desired, with an identical gadget in the window that is open when you are writing a reply — this gadget in the Replying setup window only selects the default. The concept of reply quoting is explained more fully in section 4.2. The five settings are:

• “Add >” puts a greater-than character in the left margin of all quoted text. This is a common style used to indicate that the text is a quotation from somebody else’s message.
• “Add XX>” is similar, but puts the initials of the person who wrote the quoted text before the greater-than sign. This is also a commonly used style. It will use up to three initials from the name, or use the entire name if it’s no more than three letters long. If the name is one word but longer than three letters, it will use the first two letters with the second letter in lowercase. It does not add anything to any lines that have already got something similar at the left edge, and blank lines are left blank.
• “Wrap XX>” is like “Add XX>” except that it attempts to reformat paragraphs before adding the XX> part at the left margin. This helps prevent situations where long lines get broken into a slightly shorter line followed by a line containing only a word or two, but can occasionally mess up text that is organized as a list or table of separate lines not meant to be run together. Q-Blue 2.4 does not attempt to reformat any text that already has “>” marks. This is the initial default setting.
• “Verbatim” makes no changes to the text being quoted. It preserves the text as close as possible to its original form — which may sometimes mean that some lines are wider than the screen. It is up to you to indicate in your reply that the text you use is a quote of someone else’s words.
• “None” lets you start with a clean slate. No text from the message you are replying to is supplied when you use this choice.

To the right of this cycle gadget is a numeric string gadget labeled Quote right margin, which sets the right margin used for preparing quoted text. This only affects text that “>” or “XX>” is put in front of — the right margin for text that you type yourself is controlled by your editor program, not by Q-Blue. It controls how many characters are allowed on a quoted line, including the stuff added at the left margin, before the last few words are wrapped onto the next line. The default value is 76, and the maximum value allowed is 80. On some BBSes, values higher than 78 may not work properly. The minimum value allowed is 30, unless you set it to zero.

It is sometimes wise to set this number to a lower value, such as 72; the reason for this is that someone else may re-quote the text you quote, and add additional “>” or “XX>” or other markers to the left margin, and unless their right margin is several characters wider than yours, the prose may get mangled by their quoting software. Few programs know how to reformat such paragraphs when quoting them; more often they break long lines by putting one or two words on a line by themselves, or even truncate the end of each line. On the other hand, if you use too narrow a margin and don’t use “Wrap XX>” you may mangle stuff pretty badly yourself. “Wrap XX>” style quoting is recommended if you are quoting with margins narrower than the original text. The margin setting is ignored with “Verbatim” quoting, unless it is zero. A value of zero in the Quote right margin gadget can be thought of as “infinity”; it allows lines to be of unlimited length. When that gadget is set to 0, Q-Blue will merge each quoted paragraph into a single long line. This is intended for those who wish to use a true word processor as their message editor — one which deals naturally with text that has line breaks only between paragraphs, and wraps text within a paragraph to suit itself. When the quote margin is set to 0, you won’t get a “>” or “XX>” mark at the start of each line, but only one at the start of each paragraph. The effect applies regardless of quoting style; even in “Verbatim” mode paragraphs will have their internal line breaks removed, and there is no difference between the “Add XX>” and “Wrap XX>” styles.

6.5) Header and signature strings for replies

Below the gadgets related to reply quoting is a string gadget labeled Quote header. This string specifies a block of text that gets put at the top of a quoted message, if any quoting style but None is used. The string can contain codes which stand for things like the name of the author of the message being quoted, the name it was addressed to, the date it was written, or the original subject line it had. For instance, let us assume that John Smith wrote a message to Mary Jones, and you are writing a reply to that message. John Smith’s words will be included (quoted) in your reply. The quote header string will produce an introductory statement at the top of the quoted text, such as:

At 9:31 PM on 1 Apr 97, John Smith said to Mary Jones:

That is the default style. But the header can be as complex as:

* From: John Smith                        To: Mary Jones
* Area: Radio and TV                    Date: 1 Apr 97, 9:31 PM
* Subj: Rush Limbaugh is a divine prophet

or as simple as:

Dear John,

The flexibility of these texts is accomplished by using “@” codes, along the same general principles as the codes used in editor and compressor commands (see sections 4.2 and 5.3). But the actual codes used are very different, except for “@N” which is universal. The full list of codes that can be used is explained in the next section. Some basic ones are: “@N” is a line break, “@A” is the name of the author of the message you are replying to, “@R” is the name that their message was addressed to, “@S” is the subject line of that message, “@C” is the name of the area it was posted in, and “@D” and “@T” are the date and time that it was written. More advanced sequences like “@FY” and “@Z” and “@36” are covered in the next section.

The first example would be produced with this string in the quote header gadget: “At @T on @D, @A said to @R:@N”. This is the gadget’s default setting. The simple third example would just require “Dear @FY,@N”. The complicated second example would be produced by

 * From: @A@44To: @R@N * Area: @C@42Date: @D, @T@N * Subj: @S@N

(with a space at the beginning). In each case, the final “@N” puts a blank line between the header and the quoted text following it.

Below the Quote header is a similar string labeled C.C. header. It specifies what announcing banner is put at the head of someone else’s message when you use the Carbon copy command (see section 10, particularly 10.3). It uses the same “@” codes that the quote header does. The default string is:

 ** Message forwarded by Q-Blue @V@N ** Posted @T on @D in area "@Z@C"@N ** From @A to @R@N ** Subject "@Z@S"@N

all on one line. There is a space character at the beginning. With its four @N codes, it produces four lines of information at the top of the forwarded message, followed by a blank line. The two @Z codes cause the area name and subject to be shortened if they’re too long to fit on the same line with the other stuff around them. When you carbon-copy your own replies, this header is not added. Section 10.3 contains an example of a header produced by this string.

Below that is a string labeled Signature. This specifies text that is appended to the end of each message you write, and is often used to list important data about yourself such as various email addresses or your company affiliation. This string uses a subset of the “@” codes used in the two header strings. Most of the codes are ignored; the ones that work are @N, @D, @T, @V, and @number. The @D and @T codes give the date and time of the moment the signature is written, not the time of some other message. Usually @N is the only code used here. Note that any signature you specify will always have a blank line put in front of it to separate it from the message it follows, so you don’t need to put an “@N” at the start of it. The signature text will be loaded into your editor as part of the message text file when you write a reply. It is not kept separate, as taglines are.

Perhaps the easiest way to put a multiline signature in here is to write it out somewhere else such as in a text editor, and then copy it to the clipboard and paste it into the Signature gadget by pressing right-Amiga-V while it’s active. The line breaks will be automatically replaced with “@N” codes, as with any string gadget where those codes are used. But note that the gadget holds at most 400 characters. Many people like to create signatures more than a thousand characters long, but Q-Blue will not participate in such excess. With a little discipline, 400 is plenty. Also remember, when writing your signature, that any “@” character, for instance in an Internet address, has to be written as “@@” to translate correctly.

6.6) Special codes used in header and signature strings

The codes that are used in the Quote header and C.C. header strings each consist of a “@” character followed by one or two letters or digits. The code sequences are:

@A	the full name of the quoted message’s author
@R	the full name of the person that message was addressed to
@Y	the full name of the person your reply is addressed to
@FA	the first name of the quoted message’s author
@FR	the first name of the person that message was addressed to
@FY	the first name of the person your reply is addressed to
@LA	the last name of the quoted message’s author
@LR	the last name of the person that message was addressed to
@LY	the last name of the person your reply is addressed to
@S	the original subject line (or title) of the message
@J	the original subject line with any initial “Re:” removed
@D	the the date the message was written, in “DD Mmm YY” format
@T	the the time of day that it was written, in AM/PM format
@C	the BBS’s name for the message area it was in
@V	Q-Blue’s version number (currently 2.4)
@N	a break between two lines of text
@Z	truncate the next @C or @S or @J to avoid breaking the line
@@	an “@” character
@number	(e.g. “@36”) insert spaces up to column number

Putting a letter “F” in the middle of @A, @R, or @Y reduces it to just the first name; putting an “L” in the middle gives the last name. The first name it selects usually consists of everything before the first blank space in the name, and the last name is everything after the last blank space, but if the name is all one word then the whole thing is used as both first and last name, and if the name starts with the word “The” (for instance, if someone is using “The Mad Bomber” as an alias), then everything after the “The” is used as both the first and last name. Also, if the last word is something like “Jr.” or “Ph.D” or “III”, then it uses the previous word as the last name.

In a typical reply, @Y would be the same as @A (and @FY and @LY would be the same as @FA and @LA): both being the author of the message you are replying to. But if you change the name in the To gadget when replying, @Y will refer to that newly chosen name, while @A would still refer to the person who wrote the message being replied to. Naturally, this only applies if you change the To name before editing your reply, which is when this format string is used. And if you used the Reply to addressee command, then @Y is by default the same as @R, not @A. If a name is all uppercase, Q-Blue tries to capitalize it reasonably.

The @Z code needs some explanation. Normally, if a subject or area name is so long that it causes a line to be longer than 80 characters, the line is word-wrapped — broken into two lines. But if @Z is present before @C or @S or @J, then that area name or subject string will be truncated to fit, so that the line it’s on won’t go past 80 characters. Since area names can be up to 49 characters long and subjects can be up to 71 characters, but both are much shorter in the great majority of cases, it makes sense to use @Z rather than trying to make sure there is always enough room for the longest possible cases.

The use of a number after the @, for instance “@20”, causes the next text to appear that many columns from the left edge of the screen. It is used to put something in a fixed horizontal position when the text before it is variable in length. It will insert no spaces if already past the specified position. This code can be used in the Signature gadget as well as in header strings, unlike most of the fancier codes. It can help you fit a “bigger” signature into the available 400 character space... though it should be kept in mind that giant signatures are often viewed as a mark of cluelessness.

6.7) Other gadgets in the Replying setup window

Below the Signature string in this window are two cycle gadgets for controlling the tagline feature, and a string gadget for specifying the file to load taglines from. The left hand cycle gadget is labeled Default tagline, with keyboard shortcut D and four settings: None, Random, Sequence, and Manual. On the right is one labeled Tagline after, with shortcut T and two cryptic-looking settings: “...” and “* Q-Blue”. Taglines are explained more fully in sections 10.9 and 10.10.

The first gadget tells Q-Blue when and how it should add a tagline to a reply automatically. When set to None, no taglines are added automatically, though you can add them when you choose with the Tagline button in the message writing window. When it’s set to Random, then every time you write a new message or reply, Q-Blue will randomly select a tagline from the currently loaded tagline file, and add it to the end of the message. Sequence is like Random except that it causes taglines to be used in the order they appear in the tagline file, instead of randomly. If it’s set to Manual, then whenever you edit a new message or reply, the tagline selection window will be automatically opened when you first edit a message, with a random line selected, allowing you to select a different line or tell it not to use any tagline. When you re-edit an existing message, none of these things are done. The tagline can, however, still be changed manually with the Tagline button.

The Tagline after cycle gadget controls what characters are used to mark the beginning of a tagline. Normally, each tagline is preceded by three periods and a space — this is the de facto standard way of telling taglines apart from other lines. When reading Blue Wave packets, this method is always used. But when reading QWK packets, there is another tagline style you can use. This cycle gadget shows either “...” or “* Q-Blue” to indicate which to use, the latter being the default.

With QWK messages, Q-Blue normally adds a line at the end of each nonprivate message you write saying “* Q-Blue 2.4 *” (with a space at the beginning of the line). This is known as a “brag line” — most offline readers add one. Section 6.8 tells how you can turn off braglines. If the Tagline after cycle gadget is set to “...”, the tagline is put just above the brag line, preceded with three dots, just as with Blue Wave mail. But if the gadget is set to “* Q-Blue”, the tagline will be put on the same line as the brag, just after the second asterisk, so only one line is added to your message instead of two. Naturally, this means that the tagline can’t be as long as it can be the other way, but if you select a tagline too long to fit after the brag line, it will put it on a separate line just as if the “...” option were selected. With private messages, no brag is normally added (as of Q-Blue 2.3), but if the tagline style is “* Q-Blue” and you are adding a tagline which is short enough to fit after the brag, the brag will be used in front of it instead of “...”.

The reason this style choice is not available with Blue Wave is that the brag line is added by the mail door after you upload your replies, so Q-Blue has no control over it. The QWK brag line, by the way, is not added to the message if the last line of the regular message text (not counting the tagline) contains the word “Q-Blue”. This allows you to substitute your own brag line for the standard one, with the caveat that it will be placed before the tagline (if present) instead of after. Normally there is a blank line between the end of the message and the brag line, but if a “...” style tagline is added, the brag line comes right after it with no space, whether it’s the QWK brag line added by Q-Blue or the Blue Wave brag line added by the mail door. This means you can add this kind of tagline by simply typing it at the end of your message, rather than by using the tagline window, if you wish.

Beneath these two cycle gadgets is a string gadget labeled File containing taglines. To use taglines conveniently, you need to put the full pathname of a text file containing your taglines into this gadget, or its equivalent in the BBS Local setup window. If you specify no file here and try to use taglines, you will get an ASL requester asking you to select a tagline file.

At the bottom of the Replying setup window is a string gadget labeled Default alias name. Its use is strictly optional. When reading Blue Wave mail, certain message areas may allow you to enter a message that is “from” any name you want to use, instead of making you use your real name or logon handle. When you write a message in such an area, Q-Blue will normally set the message’s author name to be the name or handle you log onto the BBS with, but if you enter a different name in this gadget, Q-Blue will use that instead. You can, of course, change the name at the time you are writing the message; this name is only a default. Any messages addressed to the name in this gadget will be counted as being addressed to you. When reading QWK mail, it will put this name in place of your real name when writing messages, when you use the gadget labeled Handle in the message writing window (see section 10.2).

Most of the gadgets described in this section have a duplicate in the BBS Local setup window, allowing its global setting to be overridden for a single BBS. The next section covers this.

6.8) Local setup options for individual BBSes

The BBS Local setup window, which can be opened with the key shortcut Alt-B, differs from the other setup windows. It cannot be used when no packet is open, and its settings are not saved in the regular configuration file. It allows you to change some of Q-Blue’s setup options depending on where the mail you are reading came from. Most of its gadgets are duplicates of ones that exist in the Replying setup window. The gadgets from that window that are duplicated are the File containing taglines string gadget, the Default tagline and Tagline after cycle gadgets, the Quote header and Signature string gadgets (but not the C.C. header string), the Default alias name string, and the Quote right margin numeric string gadget.

An important note about the File containing taglines string gadget: if you use the tagline window’s Load or saVe buttons to select or create a new tagline file (see section 10.9), the newly selected filename will be copied into this gadget. The change becomes permanent if you reopen the BBS Local setup window and select Save. The global tagline file string gadget is not affected.

There is also a Compressor cycle gadget which is a sort of duplicate, in different form, of the Compression type submenu. There are two checkmarks which (for no particular reason) are not present in the Replying setup window: they are labeled Permit blank To & Subject and Indent XX> quotes.

There is a button labeled Mail... which, if enabled, opens a second window. This is documented in the next two sections. Finally, there are Load and Save buttons.

The Indent XX> quotes checkmark affects whether text quoted in the “Add XX>” or “Wrap XX>” styles has a space character at the beginning of each line. This is necessary with some BBS software that doesn’t pay close attention to such quote marks, in order to prevent these paragraphs from being word-wrapped so that the XX> markers appear in the middle of a line. It defaults off except with Searchlight BBS. Quoting with XX> markers is explained fully in sections 4.3 and 6.4.

The Permit blank To & Subject checkmark makes it legal to upload a message which has no name in the To field and/or no title in the Subject field. Normally Q-Blue will not permit a message to be saved without these. Even with this gadget checked, Q-Blue will warn you if they are blank; when you tell it to save the message, it will flash the screen and activate the empty To or Subject string gadget. If you then click Save again, it will save the message. Messages with blank To or Subject fields should not be used carelessly.

In each case, except for the two checkmarks, the gadget overrides an equivalent global setting. For instance, if the File containing taglines string is blank, then the pathname in the Replying setup window is used, but if it contains a pathname, then that is used instead of the one in the Replying window. The same rule applies to the Quote header and Signature strings. The three cycle gadgets each have an extra option that reads “(global)”. When set to that option, then the equivalent gadget in the Replying window, or the Compression type submenu selection in the case of the Compressor gadget, takes effect. But when any other option is selected in the cycle gadget, it takes effect and the global one is ignored. The blank or global option is the default in all cases.

The Tagline after gadget is a special case. Besides the “...” and “* Q-Blue” options available in the equivalent gadget in the Replying setup window, and the “(global)” option, there is a fourth option labeled “Stealth”. This works the same as “...”, with one difference: it causes your replies to contain no Q-Blue bragline. (When Q-Blue was shareware, this option was available only to users who had registered.) The “* Q-Blue 2.4 *” line normally appended to QWK replies is left out, and in Blue Wave replies it pretends that the message was written by BWAVE for MS-DOS. When a Blue Wave packet is open, the “...” and “Stealth” options are the only ones available in this cycle gadget because the “* Q-Blue” option only works with QWK packets.

The Compressor cycle gadget (key shortcut C) is also a little bit of a special case. It does not completely override the global setting for which compressor is selected. It tells Q-Blue what compression type to expect for packets that have the right name for this BBS. But if the globally selected packer type matches the file, it will use that without even checking what the local one is. If it doesn’t fit but the local one does, then the global one will be set to match the local one, so that the right packer is used for archiving replies. The cycle gadget’s options simply consist of the same packer type names listed in the Compression type submenu, and the (global) option. If the mail packet you are reading came from a BBS that uses a different compression type than most of the other mail you read, then click this cycle gadget until the right compressor is showing, and then click the Save button. From now on, Q-Blue will open the packet without asking each time whether you want to change compression type. But then when you open another packet that uses your normal type, after opening one of these different ones, it will think you still want to use the special type that the local window specified for the other BBS. The cure for this is to set a local compression type for each different BBS that you call regularly.

Note that since this setting is looked up before the packet is opened, Q-Blue is not always guaranteed to find the right local compression type for a given mail packet. Each BBS has a short name, known as the “BBS ID” or “packet name”, inside its mail packets. Usually, the mail packet itself is a file with that same name and some extension. For instance, a QWK packet from a BBS that uses the packet name “SOMEBBS” will typically be named SOMEBBS.QWK. When a packet is open, this ID is shown in the screen’s title bar, which will read (for example):

Q-Blue 2.4: reading "SOMEBBS"

But sometimes the filenames don’t match the BBS ID, and in that case the local compressor selection gadget won’t be very useful.

When you use the Save gadget (key shortcut S), it writes a file in the BBS context directory that you specified in the Directories setup window. The filename is chosen automatically, so no file requester appears. It writes a simple textfile that lists all the non-default option settings in the window, and has the chosen compressor name in its filenote. The filenote is used in order to avoid reading the whole file twice, once at decompression time and once after the packet is open.

The Load gadget (key shortcut L) lets you load in options from such a file using the ASL file requester. The requester has a pattern in it to find only files with names ending in “.local-QWK” or “.local-BW”. The Save option writes out files with those names, with the part before the period being the BBS’s packet name, and the “QWK” or “BW” part depending on which type of packet is open. The Load option lets you undo the changes you’ve made since the last time you saved, or copy local settings from one BBS to another by selecting a file with the other BBS’s packet name.

When a mail packet (or BBS file) is opened, the corresponding local setup file is automatically loaded. Of course, for this to work depends on no two BBSes you call having the same packet name. Non-unique packet names cause trouble for everybody, though, so sysops do avoid them. Of course, since Q-Blue looks for this file in the BBS context directory, the local setup window will not work at all if no such directory is defined. If none is yet specified, the Save button will produce an error message.

6.9) Configuring QWK packet netmail

“Netmail” is a term used for messages which are sent to a single person, usually privately, who is not on the same BBS as the one you’re calling, via FidoNet or any other network that uses the same type of mail software. To send such a message, you must not only supply the recipient’s name, but a Fido-style address for the BBS that the recipient would read it on. The Blue Wave packet format includes built-in support for sending netmail messages, but the QWK format does not. Because of this lack, many QWK mail packing systems (“doors”) have added features which make it possible, by various methods, to send netmail messages in an ordinary QWK upload. Unfortunately, different QWK doors use different methods, not compatible with each other. Many offer no method at all.

To deal with this, Q-Blue’s BBS Local setup window has a button labeled “Mail...” which opens another window which is labeled Email/Netmail on this BBS. It has two gadgets along its top edge that let you describe the method a particular BBS’s door uses for netmail. These gadgets are ghosted for Blue Wave packets. The approach used does not cover every variation used by different QWK doors, but it handles the majority of them.

The first gadget is a string labeled QWK netmail kluge line. This describes the format of a special extra line of text that is added to the top of a netmail message, specifying the address of the destination BBS. Most QWK doors with netmail features use some kind of special line at the top of the text. The format of this line depends on the particular mail door you’re using, and you should consult that door’s documentation if in doubt about what it uses. For those that use some other method of specifying the destination address, such as SFMail for Spitfire BBS, which expects the destination address at the beginning of the subject line, Q-Blue will not help you. But there are two exceptions: the subject line method used by MKQWK, JC-QWK, and OLMS for Remote Access BBS is supported, and so is the awkward system used by PCBoard 15.0 and newer.

The string that you put into this gadget is a copy of what the first line of the message should be, with a “/” (a slash character) substituted for the actual address. When you write a netmail message, Q-Blue looks for the slash and replaces it with the full Fido-style address, which you have entered in the Netmail address string gadget in the message writing window (see section 10.6). The format of this string depends on what QWK door the BBS uses to pack your mail, or in some cases, on the software that the sysop uses to connect the BBS to the network.

The two most popular format strings are “To: /” and “->/”. Use the first string, “To: /”, if the BBS uses Maximus or EzyCom software with built-in QWK packing, or if it is RBBS with either NoSnail or MailManager +Plus+ network software. The other string, “->/”, can be used with the TomCat, wcMAIL, or wcQWK door on BBSes running WildCat!, and also be used for the QSO mail packer on TBBS systems, and the TriMail door for TriBBS. In some cases the form “->/@fidonet” may be necessary. Silver Xpress mail doors, used in QWK mode, generally support both of the above strings, regardless of BBS software.

If you are using a SearchLight BBS with Valence QWK door, you can use “@/” or “Netmail: /”. The “@/” format supposedly also works for QSO according to its docs, but it is widely reported that it actually does not work. (In fact, I’m not sure if the “->/” form works in QSO versions before 2.0.)

If the software is PCBoard, the correct string depends on what Fido mailer software is in use. If the Fido networking is built-in, as is the case with recent versions of PCBoard, then make sure the Use PCBoard extensions checkmark is checked, and leave the netmail kluge string empty. Q-Blue will then use PCBoard’s extended “@TO” kluge line to include the address. The Direct and Crash netmail flags (see section 10.7) can be used in this case, though of course the BBS may disregard them. If the Fido mail software is InterPCB, the string “@>/” should be used. In some cases “@>/@fidonet” needs to be used instead. With FidoPCB or QFront software, the string is “(/)”.

The MKQWK and JC-QWK doors for Remote Access BBS use a method where the address is put into the subject line, the subject goes into the kluge line at the top of the message text. Q-Blue detects MKQWK and JC-QWK packets and will correctly handle netmail addressing if you select the proper netmail area. With these mail doors, leave the kluge line string gadget empty. With MKQWK, but generally not with other QWK mail doors, the netmail flags Direct, Immediate, and Crash can be used. The BBS may disregard them, of course. MKQWK and JC-QWK also allow the subject line on netmail to be longer than the normal 25 character limit. All of this also applies to the OLMS door, but with that door it makes more sense to just download your mail in Blue Wave format, rendering this setup process unnecessary.

I have heard reports that these three Remote Access doors can also use the Valence method, “@/”. I have not confirmed this. But leaving the string gadget empty works better, because it enables you to use a longer subject heading.

There are probably other styles as well, but this probably covers the majority of cases. To summarize:

To: /	Maximus, EzyCom, RBBS, Silver Xpress
->/	TomCat, wcMAIL, wcQWK, QSO, TriMail, Silver Xpress
@/	Valence, possibly several others
(/)	PCBoard/FidoPCB, PCBoard/QFront
@>/	PCBoard/InterPCB
empty	MKQWK, JC-QWK, OLMS
empty	PCBoard/built-in; Use PCBoard extensions gadget must be checked

Just enter the appropriate string (without quote marks) in the QWK netmail kluge line string in the BBS Local setup window. If you’re not sure what string a given BBS’s mail door uses, check the BBS’s help files or bulletins, or ask the sysop. In some cases, the mail door itself has a Help command that gives the necessary information, or a Download the user manual command.

There is one other piece of information that is needed for creating QWK netmail messages: which area they should be put in. In most cases, one message area is set aside for all netmail traffic. If there is more than one such area, Q-Blue’s local configuration can only support one. Specifying the netmail area is done with the Area: button to the right of the QWK netmail kluge line gadget. If you click it or press the A key, a list window opens showing all of the possible message areas. You just have to find the correct area in the list, and select it. Usually the right area has the word “netmail” in its name. Again, if in doubt, consult the BBS’s help texts or bulletins, or ask the sysop. When the window opens, if no area is currently selected, it tries to set the current selection to an area with the word “netmail” or “net” or “mail” or “matrix” in its name. This guess may help, or may not.

When you select an area, that area’s number is displayed to the right of the Area: button. If the kluge line string is specified and the area is selected, the netmail gadgets in the message writing window will work. If one or the other is not set, they will be ghosted. If an area is selected but the kluge line string is not (except in the cases mentioned above where it can work when empty), the number next to the Area: button will be ghosted to show that it is not in use.

The list of areas in that window is exactly the same as the list used for selecting a message area for writing a message. There is one additional option, however, represented by the gadget at the bottom of the screen labeled None. If you click this or press N, you are specifying that there is no area designated for netmail. The window closes, and any number written after the Area: gadget is erased. This list window can be word-searched like any other list window (see sections 9.5 and 9.6), and it is possible to add a missing area to the list when reading QWK mail, as with other areas lists (see section 10.5).

When this is all set up, don’t forget to use the Save button so that the options will be remembered next time you open a packet from the same BBS. Remember that the Save setup menu item only saves global options, not those in the BBS Local setup window.

6.10) Configuring Internet email

As with Fido-type netmail, there is no one agreed-upon method for handling Internet email in an offline mail packet, at least not with mail formats older than Blue Wave version 3. (With version 3 of Blue Wave, the “Mail...” gadget is disabled and this window is not used at all.) But there is less disagreement than with netmail, so instead of giving you an awkward method of specifying an arbitrary format in a string gadget, Q-Blue gives you a cycle gadget that selects one of three common methods. At this writing all BBSes I know of use one of these three, and most of those use just one, which Q-Blue calls the Generic style. It consists of putting a line beginning with the word “To:” and followed by the internet address that the mail is being sent to at the top of the message body. Searchlight BBS uses a different line, starting with the word “Internet:” instead. And PCBoard, when email is handled internally instead of by add-on programs, uses its own special “@TO” and “@TO2” header lines. The cycle gadget for selecting this in the Email/Netmail on this BBS window is labeled email Kluge style, and its options are labeled Generic, PCBoard, and SearchLt. Its keyboard shortcut is K. In most cases, if PCBoard or SearchLt is the correct choice, Q-Blue will manage to set them automatically, but this cannot be guaranteed.

Just below the Area: button which is used for selecting where netmail goes, is a similar button for selecting what area Internet email belongs in. It is labeled arEa: and uses E (for Email) as its keyboard shortcut, while the button for netmail uses A. It works the same way the netmail Area: button works: it opens a list window showing available areas, allowing you to select the right one where email belongs, or select None. The selected area number, if any, is shown to the right of the button.

If your email kluge style is SearchLt or PCBoard, then the area is the only other thing you need to select. All of the other gadgets in the window are ghosted. But in the Generic case, there may be several other things you need to set. There are two more string gadgets and two checkmarks that are enabled in this case.

One question that has to be settled is this: if the email address you are sending is short enough that it can fit into the regular To field of the message without needing an extra kluge line to contain it, can the message be sent without using the kluge? The answer is, sometimes yes and sometimes no. Many BBSes allow Internet addresses to be put into the normal To field and will correctly send such mail. But others cannot send mail unless the kluge line is used. The string gadget labeled Internet email dummy recipient is used for answering this question. If left blank — and nowadays, this should work with most BBSes — then Q-Blue will use the regular To field instead of the kluge line whenever the address you are mailing to is short enough to fit, and if the kluge line is used, will put the word “ALL” into the To field, which is ignored. None of this is visible to the Q-Blue user once this is configured; it’s done automatically behind the scenes.

In those cases where the kluge line must always be used, it is sometimes necessary that the regular To field contain a particular special word to inform the system that the message is email. “UUCP” is probably the most common special word used this way. The Internet email dummy recipient string gadget is used to specify this special word. Whatever you put into this gadget is always used in the To field of email uploaded to this BBS. If you do not know of any requirement for using a special word such as “UUCP” but a kluge line is required, I recommend putting the word “ALL” into this gadget. Again, when you are writing a message, this process is hidden: you simply type the email address into the To: string gadget, and Q-Blue will arrange the data as needed in the message that is uploaded.

Many BBSes that participate in Fidonet do not have any direct ability to send email, but can send it indirectly by transmitting your message as netmail to a Fido node which will translate it into email. This system that translates email is known as a “gateway”. Q-Blue can automate even this two-stage process, adding both the netmail and email kluge lines necessary. To use this type of email, you must enter the Fido address of the gateway system into the string gadget labeled Fidonet address of gateway. There are many gateways in use; the idea is that each one should serve only a small region instead of offering a service to Fidonet as a whole. Consult the bulletins or help files on your BBS to find the right address, or ask your sysop. The information should also include a description of what your own email address would be, which other people can use to email you via the gateway.

With older Fido gateway software, it was necessary to put the word “UUCP” into the Internet email dummy recipient string gadget, but nowadays that can usually be left blank. Fido-gated email, as far as I know, always uses the Generic kluge style. The gateway address gadget is ghosted when the kluge style cycle gadget is not set to Generic. In most cases, the area for sending this email should be set the same as for sending Fido netmail — that is, when using QWK mail, the Area: and arEa: buttons should show the same number after them. (With version 2 Blue Wave mail, the top two netmail gadgets are ghosted.) But there are some BBSes which separate netmail into more than one area, and may use a different one for gated email than for normal netmail. In some cases, email and netmail — and even local mail — coexist in the same area even though email is not gated. Q-Blue will not send QWK email as gated unless an address is specified in the Fidonet address of gateway gadget. With QWK packets, the method of sending netmail must also be configured, as described in the previous section, for gating to work.

Occasionally there are BBSes which support both direct email and gated email. Unfortunately, Q-Blue can only support one email method at a time. Particularly in the case of a version 3 Blue Wave door, using the alternate method of gated email has to be done “by hand”, since Q-Blue already knows of one email method.

Some BBSes have kluges that allow a subject line longer than 25 characters to be used with QWK mail. Q-Blue will detect such cases automatically when they are available, except in the case of PCBoard, because some PCBoard mail doors produce QWK packets which do not identify which kind of BBS they came from. If you are reading mail from a BBS using PCBoard version 15.0 or higher, and you want to have subject lines up to 60 characters long instead of just 25, you can check the checkmark gadget labeled Use PCBoard extensions, keyboard shortcut U. This also must be checked if you want to use PCBoard’s internal handling of Fido netmail — that is, if you are leaving the QWK netmail kluge line gadget empty. This checkmark is always checked (though it is ghosted) when the email kluge type is PCBoard.

For PCBoard BBSes that still use the Generic email kluge type (and there are many at this writing), and also for some Remote Access mail doors, there is one further question. These systems may have a kluge line that allows the subject field to be longer than 25 characters, and a different kluge line that allows email to be addressed, but cannot use both at once! Each will only work if it is the first line in the message. To handle these cases, the last gadget in the Email/Netmail on this BBS window is a checkmark labeled long subject kluge does NOT work with internet email. The key shortcut is N. When not ghosted, Q-Blue will often cause this gadget to be checked by default, just to be safe. If you uncheck it, this tells Q-Blue that it is okay to use a long subject line on an email message. On a PCBoard system that still uses Generic email addressing, it should probably be checked. With the MKQWK door for remote access, it should stay checked, as of the most recent information I have. With the JC-QWK door, it can be unchecked according to the documentation I have.

PART III: OPERATION

7) SCROLLING LIST WINDOW OPERATION

7.1) Basic list window control

A scrolling list window appears whenever you need to make one choice from a list of choices. The most common case is to choose a message area from the list known to the BBS. Section 1.6 gave a brief introduction to these list windows, which in essence are similar to scrolling lists seen in many programs and requesters. This section thoroughly covers all details of using these list windows, including options that differ from one to another.

Almost everything can be done with either the keyboard or the mouse. Menus are not available while such a list window is open. With the mouse, there are three things you can do: click a special-purpose gadget at the bottom of the screen, click on a line listed in the window, or use the scroll gadget at the window’s right edge. If you click in the window, the line the pointer is on becomes the current selection (the highlighted line), and if you double-click on a line, the window is closed and that line is taken as your final selection. There are two cases where double-clicking is ignored: when adding or dropping message areas via the Mail door command, and when viewing taglines with the Maintain taglines command. In these two cases, it does not matter which line is highlighted when the window is closed.

If there are more lines than the window has room for, you can slide the scroll gadget at the right edge to move more lines into the visible area. Clicking and dragging the bright part (the “knob”) causes lines to move up and down in response to the vertical movements of the mouse. Clicking in the darkened areas of the scroll gadget outside the sliding part causes the next or previous windowful of lines to show (with one line overlapping), when you click below or above the knob, respectively. Clicking the little arrow gadgets next to the slider cause the display to scroll up or down by one line. Holding down the button on one of those gadgets for more than half a second makes it scroll continuously.

The window can be resized to show more or fewer lines. If you move or resize the window, then the next time you open it, it will remember where you left it and what size it was. The zoom gadget will toggle the window between two different sizes — initially the alternate size is slightly smaller than the whole screen. If you don’t want to make any selection, click the close gadget in the upper left corner, and it will close the window and behave as if you had never opened it — anything you did to move the highlighted line will be ignored. Double-clicking a line means “okay” and using the close gadget means “cancel”.

As already described, pressing the up or down arrow key moves the highlighted bar up or down by one line, and pressing return or the space bar closes the window, selecting the line that is highlighted at the time as your final choice. If the selection is moved above or below the range of lines shown, the window will scroll to keep the highlight line visible. To close the window and have Q-Blue behave as if it had not been opened, press the Esc key. The return key or space bar or numeric pad Enter key means “okay”, the Esc key means “cancel”. (A common mistake is to accidentally use a “cancel” option, such as clicking the closebox, when you meant to tell it “okay”, and then wonder why it didn’t do anything.)

There are also keys for moving the highlighted line by a windowful at a time, and for moving the highlight bar to the first or last line. The complete list of keystroke commands for changing the currently selected line is:

• to move the highlight bar down one line, press the down arrow or right arrow key, or 2 or 6 on the numeric pad (the IBM equivalents of down arrow and right arrow). For windows listing message areas, the ] (next area) key also works.
• to move the highlight bar up one line, press the up arrow or left arrow key, or the numeric pad IBM equivalents: 8 or 4. The [ key also works for windows listing areas.
• to move the highlight bar down one page (as many lines as show in the window, minus one), press PgDn (3 on the numeric pad), or hold down a shift or Alt key and press down arrow or right arrow (either the regular one or the numeric pad equivalent).
• to move the highlight bar up one page, press PgUp (9 on the numeric pad), or hold down a shift or Alt key and press up arrow or left arrow (regular or numeric pad).
• to move the highlight bar to the last line, press End (1 on the numeric pad), or hold down the Ctrl key and press down arrow or right arrow.
• to move the highlight bar to the first line, press Home (7 on the numeric pad), or hold down the Ctrl key and press up arrow or left arrow.
• to scroll the window so that the highlight bar is in the center, without changing the current selection, press the 5 key on the numeric pad, or the ` (grave accent or reverse single quote) key just above the tab key.

To summarize the use of shift keys with arrow keys: no shift key means move by one line, shift or Alt means move by one windowful, and Ctrl means move to the first or last line. This allows even an Amiga 600 with no numeric pad access to every option.

7.2) Special features of message and area list windows

There are several special key commands that depend on which particular list window is open. Generally, but not in every case, there is also an equivalent gadget at the bottom of the screen, which you can click if it’s visible.

Pressing the letter S, or clicking the gadget at the bottom of the screen labeled Search, lets you do a word search on the contents of the list window. Pressing U or Alt-U undoes the effects of the last search. When displaying messages or areas with readable messages, Alt-U affects all areas while U only affects the current area. See sections 9.5 and 9.6 for details on how searching works.

If the window showing readable message areas is open, pressing the L key or clicking the List gadget closes it and opens the window showing the messages in the selected area. Conversely, pressing A or clicking Areas while viewing the list of one area’s messages closes that window and opens the window showing the areas with readable messages. This version is not able to have both of these windows open at once, though each is accessible when the other is open in exactly the same way it is when you are simply reading messages.

When the window listing messages in an area is open, you can move to the next area by pressing the ] key or the previous area by pressing the [ key, just as is the case when no list window is open. Doing this causes the list window to recreate the list of messages that is displayed to suit the new area. With windows listing areas, the ] and [ keys just move the selection up or down one line. These keys always mean “next area” and “previous area”.

Note that the currently selected line in the messages list window does not “count” until the window is closed. If you switch to another area while the window is open, either with the [ or ] key, or by activating the areas list window, the current message in the previous area will be what it was before the list window was opened. Only the final area you’re in when the window is closed gets a new current message selected by the line you’ve highlighted in the list window. However, if you jump around from area to area, each area will remember what line the list window was last on. This current line value is temporary, and is meaningless after the window is closed, except for the area you end in, but is convenient if you are jumping from area to area. If you cancel the list window, everything is left exactly as it was before the list window was opened. Except when you use a word search, that is — the effect of the search remains, just as if you had done a search of the messages when the window was not open.

The list window showing areas in which you can post new messages and replies (accessible from the message writing window) does not respond to the letter L or give you a List gadget. But when a QWK packet is open, pressing C or clicking the gadget labeled Create opens a small window which allows you to enter the number and name of a new message area which is not shown. This is covered in section 10.5. This feature is also available in the list window used for adding and dropping message areas from the mail door’s list of which ones you are reading (see section 11.4), and in the windows for selecting a QWK netmail or email area in the BBS Local setup window (section 6.8). It is included so you can cope with QWK mail packers that give you an incomplete list of available areas.

When selecting an area for a message you are writing, another gadget is labeled Active or All; clicking this or pressing A toggles the list between showing every known area and showing only those you are reading messages in. See section 10.4 for details on this feature.

The window you can use to select which message areas the mail door should include in future downloads is similar, but instead of a gadget labeled Active or All, it has gadgets labeled Add, Drop, and Reset. These are explained in section 11.4. The window for selecting a QWK netmail area, available from the BBS Local setup window, has no Active/All gadget. Its special feature is a gadget labeled None for telling it to use no area at all. Section 6.8 explains this window.

7.3) Special features of other list windows

When the window listing mail packets in your downloads directory or BBS files in your context directory is open, there is a gadget labeled ASL req. Clicking it or pressing A closes the list window and brings up a standard file requester. Initially this starts out displaying the files in the same directory that the list window was showing, except that it doesn’t leave out files with names that don’t look like mail packets. If you select a different directory in it, it will remember that and display that new directory the next time you open it. In the case of opening a BBS file with the Open (no packet) command, the requester has a Pattern gadget set to show only files with names likely to be BBS files. You can erase this pattern string if you want to see all possible files.

With this file list window, you can press A or click the ASL req gadget while it is scanning the disk, before the window actually opens. You can also press Esc at that time to abort the window before it opens. In either case Q-Blue will immediately stop searching the disk for files to list.

The reason you may want to use a real file requester is because the file list window, when listing mail packets, is only capable of showing files in the downloads directory you have specified in the Directories setup window, and it only shows the files there that have names in the form expected of download packets — generally, names in the IBM form of no more than eight characters followed by a dot and three more characters, with the part after a dot fitting one of a few specific patterns. It will include files that have more than three characters after the dot if the first three are “QWK”. If you wish to select a file that doesn’t show up in the file list window, you can use the file requester to select any file your system knows about. Unfortunately the file requester does not know how to sort files from newest to oldest. This, plus the information it displays about associated reply packets and how much of each packet has been read, is why a list window is used instead of always using the ASL requester.

There is also a gadget labeled Delete, key shortcut D or Del. Using this tells Q-Blue to delete the file that is currently highlighted in the list. A requester appears, giving the full pathname of the file, its size in bytes, and its creation date, asking whether you are sure you want to delete it. If you answer Yes, the file is deleted from disk and removed from the list window. If the file has an icon, that is deleted also. If you delete the last file in the list, the window closes.

The taglines list window has special gadgets labeled Delete, Random, None, Load, and saVe. The saVe gadget is one of very few gadgets in the program with a key shortcut that is not its first letter. The letter V, instead of S, is underlined, because S is used for Search in this list window just as it is in every other. And since the taglines window has a string gadget at the bottom, it responds to the tab key, which activates the gadget. It also responds to right-Amiga-V to paste from the clipboard into the string gadget, even when the gadget is not active. The taglines window is explained fully in section 10.9.

7.4) What is shown in windows listing message areas

The window listing areas with messages in them, which is opened by the Areas command, is titled “Select message area -- Enter or double-click”. This window shows five items of information on each line.

The “long name” which describes each area’s purpose is listed in the right hand column, which is labeled Area name. Such names might be, for example, “Technical questions” or “What’s your favorite band?” or “Political conspiracy theories” or “Amiga vs. IBM flame wars”. Near the left margin, in the column labeled Area#, is the number assigned to this area, usually in ascending order. Occasionally the “number” might have letters instead of digits in it, when reading Blue Wave mail. In between are numbers giving the total count of messages found in the area, and how many of those messages are addressed to you, in the columns labeled Msgs and You. At the extreme left there may be a “*” or “>” character. A “*” indicates that you have read all of the messages in this area, and a “>” indicates that you have read some but not all. If you haven’t read any of them yet, neither is present. Or the letter S in contrasting colors might be there instead — this indicates that a word search (see section 9.5) has been used on this area, and only those messages which fit the search criteria are currently visible.

There may be a couple of extra areas listed in this window. If there are any extra information files in the mail packet, such as welcome and goodbye messages, bulletins, or a list of new files, the first area listed in the window will be a special fake area labeled “(news, bulletins, other special files)”. By selecting this area, you can read these news files as if they were messages, except that you cannot reply to them. Q-Blue will display up to 8000 lines in any one message, cutting off anything beyond that. If one of these files is longer than that, you will have to use some other method to read the whole file. The filename to look for in your work directory is shown at the top of the screen when the file’s contents are displayed. Another limitation is that Q-Blue will not display more than 50 such files in this area.

If there are any messages addressed to you, the first area listed after the special files (if any) is a collection of those messages, labeled “(messages addressed to you)”. Any message addressed to your name can be read either in this special area or in the area where it was posted; the ones here are duplicates of messages that also appear in normal areas. The real message areas are listed after the news and personal areas. If you have written any messages to upload, they are shown in a special area at the end, after the regular areas, labeled “(your replies and new messages)”. You can select and read these three special areas just like the regular ones. When this window first opens, the first regular area, after the news and personal areas, is the one initially highlighted. Except, that is, if you reopen a packet you have already partially read; in that case it will try to remember where you left off and restart at the same place.

A different variation of this list window, also labeled “Select message area -- Enter or double-click”, will appear when you are writing a message and you want to select what area to put it in. In this case, all known message areas are listed instead of just those that have messages in them, and the pseudo-areas for bulletins, replies, and personal messages are left out. And instead of listing the counts of messages in the middle, it shows the area’s “short name” or “tag”. This is usually a descriptive name for the area given as a single word in uppercase letters, for example “TECHNICAL” or “BANDS” or “CONSPIRE” or “CPU_WARS”. The short and long names are listed in columns labeled Area-tag and Full name. This only applies to Blue Wave packets, since QWK packets do not have separate long and short area names. In the latter case there is just one column labeled Name. With some BBS systems, the short name is just a number. If it’s the same as the number on the left, then Q-Blue leaves the space blank. At the left edge may be a letter indicating what type of message area this is. “E” means the area is “echoed” (connected by a FidoNet-type network) between multiple BBSes which all receive every message posted here; “R” means it’s read only (you can’t post messages here); “N” indicates a netmail area; “@” indicates an Internet email area; and “U” indicates a Usenet newsgroup (Blue Wave version 3 only). With QWK you can’t tell one kind of area from another, except that “N” and “@” appear if you have selected such areas in the BBS Local setup window. If netmail and email are in the same area, “N” shows.

Speaking of the BBS Local setup window, a different version of this same list window is used to select which area QWK netmail and email messages go in. It is identical in appearance — the only difference is in the commands available. The Active/All gadget is absent, and a gadget labeled None is present so you can specify that there is no netmail or no email area.

The window for selecting message areas to be downloaded is also very similar to the one used in the message writing window, but with an extra item of information shown at the beginning of each line, in a column labeled “Read?”. It shows words such as Add or Drop or Rset or Pers in contrasting colors if you have given some command to change how or whether mail in this area is to be downloaded. Otherwise, it shows Yes or no, or in the case of Blue Wave version 3 Pers or PAll to indicate whether the mail door is currently downloading this area, or ignoring it, or downloading it selectively. Or it shows “?” if Q-Blue doesn’t know one way or the other, which with QWK mail is the case for any area that does not actually have messages in it. The use of this window, which is significantly different from the other area windows, is explained fully in section 11.4.

7.5) What is shown in other list windows

The file list window appears when the Open or No pkt. command is given. Its title is “Select file to unpack -- Enter or double-click”, and it shows four or five items of information on each line, in columns labeled Rep?, Size, Date, Filename, and Note. This window is exactly the same for opening a mail packet and for opening a stored BBS file with the Open (no packet) command, except there is no Note column in the latter case. The files are listed in order of age, newest first. The names of the files you can open are listed in the right half of the window. Before each name is the date and time when each file was written. To the left of that is the size of the file in bytes.

At the left margin, in the Rep? column, there may be the word old or NEW. One of these words will be present if Q-Blue finds a file in your uploads directory which seems to be a reply packet matching the mail packet listed on that line. If no such reply packet exists, the space will be blank. If this mail packet is newer than the reply packet, meaning that the replies probably belong to an earlier mail packet from the same BBS, then the word NEW appears. If the mail packet is older than the reply packet, meaning that the replies were probably made to messages in this packet (or an even newer one), then the word old appears. It means that the mail packet itself is probably an “old” one.

A question mark appears after the word NEW or old, if the name of the reply packet does not match exactly and Q-Blue is just guessing that they go together. This might happen if, for instance, it finds files named PACKET2.QWK and PACKET.REP — it would guess that they are probably related. The rule for such guesses is that the mail packet name can differ from the reply packet name in having one or two digits appended to the name before the period, or substituted for the last couple of characters if adding them would put the name over eight characters long before the period. For instance, it would figure that WHATEV17.QWK probably goes with WHATEVER.REP. In a case like this it would say NEW? or old? depending on whether the .QWK file is newer or older than the .REP file. Fortunately, it’s more common to put such differentiating numbers after the period, with a name such as WHATEVER.Q03, so that such confusion doesn’t happen.

When you give the Open packet command, but not when you give the Open (no packet) command, the rightmost column of the window displays any filenote that the packet file has. If the note is long, of course, only the beginning of it is visible. The main use of this is for displaying brief notes that Q-Blue itself attaches to packets it has opened. These notes tell how many of the messages you have read, as a percentage of the total. Such a note might read, for example, “57% read.” When this is displayed in the file list window, it can be a very useful reminder of which packets still need to be read.

The window for listing messages within an area, which is opened with the List command, has the name of the listed area in its title bar. It shows five items on each line. At the left there may be a “>” character, or a letter R. A “>” means you have read this message. An R means you have written a reply to it. Next comes the number that this message has on the BBS you got it from, in a column labeled Num, or if you have turned on the Sizes in message list option (section 6.3), the length of each message in bytes in a column labeled Size. The rest of each line shows the name of the message’s author, the name that it was addressed to, and the message’s title or subject line, in columns labeled From, To, and Subject. If a name or subject is very long, only the first part of it will show. If the author or addressee is you and you are using an eight color screen, your name is shown in a contrasting color.

In the replies area, it shows the name of the area the message is in, instead of the name of who it’s from (you). The left column will contain an “R” if this message is a reply to a message in this packet, rather than being an original message or a reloaded reply to a message in a different packet. It will show a “D” in contrasting colors here if the reply is marked as deleted (see section 9.3).

In the bulletins and special files area, the list shows the name of the file, and for certain recognized filenames, a short description of its expected contents.

The simplest list window (in terms of contents) is the one for selecting taglines. It shows only the taglines themselves, one on each line. This list window, unlike any of the others, has a string gadget along its bottom edge for entering new taglines.

8) OPENING MESSAGE PACKETS

8.1) Options available when no packet is open

To read mail or create messages for uploading, you must either open a downloaded mail packet, or use the Open (no packet) command to open a stored “BBS file” that tells Q-Blue about the BBS the messages will be uploaded to. Until you do one of these two things, your actions are limited. All of your choices are available in the Packet and Setup menus — the Messages and Replies menus in the middle are inactive until a packet or BBS file is open.

The Setup menu on the right (or the equivalent keyboard shortcuts) allows you to set up Q-Blue to suit your system and your preferences, as described above in sections 3 through 6. These options are available whether anything is open or not, except for the BBS Local setup window described in sections 6.8 through 6.10. Your other choices, in the Packet menu on the left, are: you can open a mail packet, open a BBS file, change the setting for packet compression type, “iconify” the screen, display the About Q-Blue requester, or exit the program. There are gadgets at the bottom of the screen labeled Open, No pkt., Iconify, and Quit to make those four actions more convenient. Their keyboard shortcuts are O to open a packet, N to open a BBS file, I to iconify, and Q to quit.

The current archiving method can be set manually with a submenu in the middle of the Packet menu, labeled Compression type. You can select an archiver from the keyboard by holding down an Alt key and pressing a digit from 1 to 8, using the numbers along the top of the keyboard, not the numeric pad. The submenu shows which number corresponds to which method; 1 for the first archiver listed, 2 for the second, and so on. In the default setup, Alt-1 selects Zip, Alt-2 is “Zip 1.x” (for compatibility with BBSes that have outdated unzipping software), Alt-3 is LHA, Alt-4 is LZX, Alt-5 is Zoo, and Alt-6 selects Arc. The selected compression type has a checkmark next to it in the menu. Normally, when a packet is opened, the right compression method will be determined automatically, either according to the setting in the BBS Local setup window (see section 6.8) or by examining the archive itself, so there is little need to use this submenu before opening a packet. Using it after the packet is open determines how the reply packet, if any, is compressed.

The About Q-Blue option’s key shortcut is Alt-? (but it also works to type Alt-/, you don’t have to hold down the shift key when pressing the question mark key). It opens a requester which shows information about the version of Q-Blue you are using. It displays at the top the program’s name, version number, author, and creation date. The Okay gadget closes the requester.

The Iconify screen command, keyboard shortcut I, closes Q-Blue’s screen and creates an AppIcon on the Workbench screen, resembling Q-Blue’s normal icon but with an exclamation point in the upper left corner. Like the Q-Blue program icon itself, it’s an 8 color image, if your Workbench is using 8 colors. The icon is labeled Q-Blue if no packet is open, or labeled with the packet’s ID name (the same name that is shown in quotes in the screen title bar) if one is open. If no packet is open, you can open one by clicking the mouse on an icon representing a mail packet file, dragging it over the AppIcon, and “dropping” it by releasing the mouse button. This will cause Q-Blue to reopen its screen and open that file as a mail packet. If you are using the Show >> All Files option for the Workbench window the file is in, of course, then the file does not need a true icon.

What is perhaps most convenient is to set the drawer’s Workbench window to Show >> All Files and View By >> Date. That way the most recently downloaded packets are shown at the top of the window, similarly to Q-Blue’s own files list window. You can open one of these packets by “dragging” the filename with the mouse and dropping it on Q-Blue’s AppIcon when the screen is iconified, or if Q-Blue is not running yet, by shift-double-clicking the filename after clicking Q-Blue’s program icon. If you iconify the screen with a packet open, then dropping another packet onto the icon will reopen the screen and show an error message.

It is not possible to iconify the screen if any other program has a window open on Q-Blue’s screen, and an error message results in that case. If you move the icon, reopen the screen, and then iconify again, it unfortunately will not remember to put the icon where you last left it — that information is not saved for Q-Blue by the Workbench.

To reopen the screen without attempting to open a packet, simply double-click on the AppIcon. Or you can press the special key combination, if any, specified with the “POPKEY” startup argument described in section 3.1. If Q-Blue’s screen cannot be opened, it will put up a system requester with an error message. When the screen is reopened, it will use your current setting for the font, screen type, and number of colors (see sections 6.1 and 6.2). This may mean that the screen is not the same as the one you iconified — the font or resolution or number of colors may be changed. When you specify such changes to the display, they do not immediately take effect; Q-Blue keeps using the old settings until you iconify and then reopen the screen. The reopened screen will have the same public screen name that it had before closing, unless some other program steals the name.

Technical note: if a Q-Blue process receives a Ctrl-F break signal while iconified, the screen will reopen. If it receives that signal at any other time, the screen will pop to the front. This information might possibly be useful to someone who wants to control a Q-Blue screen with another program.

8.2) Initial steps in opening a mail packet

The process of opening a mail packet can be initiated several ways. You can give the Open packet menu command, or use the Open gadget or the O key, or specify the “LIST” startup argument when launching the program, as explained in section 3.1. These all have the same effect: to open a list window which lets you select a mail packet file to open. Similarly, you can select a BBS file to open by using the Open (no packet) command, the No pkt. gadget, or the N key, or by combining the “LIST” and “NOPACKET” startup arguments. And using the “PACKET” startup argument with a filename after it (or just giving a filename on the command line with no keywords), or starting Q-Blue from the Workbench with a shift-double-click on a packet icon, or dropping such an icon on Q-Blue’s AppIcon while the screen is closed, causes a named packet file to be opened without any list window selection needed. A BBS file can be opened from the command line by combining the “PACKET” and “NOPACKET” arguments (or just a filename and “NOPACKET”), but opening a BBS file by shift-double-clicking it from the Workbench is not supported.

All of these are different variations of the process of “opening”, and the next few sections describe that process in general. There are a lot of details, but don’t be intimidated — it’s usually very simple in practice and takes just a few seconds. Much of the material that follows can be regarded as background, mainly useful in case an error or other unexpected result occurs. There are a number of points where something can go wrong. This section and the following one will focus on the process as it applies to real mail packets, leaving the somewhat different handling of BBS files for section 8.4.

When you give it an open command by any method mentioned above, the first thing it does is check your work directory to see if a mail packet has already been unpacked there. If it finds files that look like they belong to a mail packet, it will use a requester to ask you whether you want to try to load what is there, or select a compressed packet to unpack. There are two gadgets labeled Load and Select — click one, or press the L or S key. This feature allows you, if you wish, to manually unpack mail into the work directory instead of having Q-Blue unpack it for you, or to reload a packet you had been reading before, if you had quit Q-Blue without closing (see section 9.3). The default choice is to try to load the files that are already there. Such files are ignored if you directly specify a packet to open, either with the “PACKET” startup argument or by feeding it a packet’s icon with the Workbench.

If it finds files which do not look like a mail packet, it puts up a warning message alerting you that these files will be deleted if you go ahead and open something. This, unlike the case of files that do look legitimate, applies even when the “PACKET” startup option, or equivalent, is used. It gives you a chance to change your choice of work directory instead, if you don’t want to lose those files — the choices are labeled Use and Change. Change is the default choice: if you select it, it cancels the packet opening operation and opens the Directories setup window (see section 3.4). Use causes the unrecognized files to be deleted. It will then check your replies directory the same way to see if it has files in it that do not look valid, and if any are found there, put up a similar warning requester allowing you to change your directories setup.

If you opt for loading files already present in the work directory, all the steps having to do with decompression will be skipped. Otherwise, if you have not specified a particular packet to open through the Workbench or the startup arguments, it will search your downloads directory and open a scrolling list window labeled Select file to unpack, showing all of the mail packets in it. Your uploads directory is also searched, so that the list can show which files have reply packets that go with them. (See section 7 for complete details on how to use list windows like this one to make selections.) If the file you want to open is not shown in the list window, you can use the standard file requester to select any file in the system, by pressing the letter A or clicking the gadget at the bottom of the screen labeled ASL req. Section 7.3 gives complete details on that option. The file requester will be used automatically if there are no files to show in the list window. Cancelling the list window or ASL requester causes the open command to be cancelled too.

Once the packet to open is selected, the next thing it does it attempt to figure out which compressor the packet was made with. If the one you currently have selected looks like the right one, it goes ahead and attempts the unpacking. If there is a “BBS Local” setup file in your BBS context directory that matches the name of the mail packet, it will check whether you specified a different compressor in the BBS Local setup window, and if so, see if that one matches instead. (The compressor name is stored in the local setup file’s comment field, not inside the file itself.) If a different compressor entirely seems to match, it puts up a requester asking you if you want to switch to that one, naming your current (global) choice and the one it guesses is correct so you can decide whether to switch. The gadgets are labeled Yes, No, and Cancel, and the default is Yes, to switch to the other compression method that it thinks is correct. Cancel, naturally, tells it not to open the packet at all. If the packet does not match any known packer, it gives you a choice between trying the compressor you’ve specified, and canceling the operation. The default is to give it a try.

Note that before trying to uncompress a mail packet, it will first delete all files in the work directory. This directory must not be used to store any permanent files. Also note that if you start Q-Blue twice, so that there are two copies of the program running at the same time, only the first one will use the work directory specified in your setup. The others will use directories consisting of the same name with a number added on the end. For instance, if the Directories setup window specifies “RAM:QBWork” as the work directory, the second Q-Blue process will use RAM:QBWork1 as a work directory. This second copy will show the number 1 in parentheses at the left end of its screen title bar, as shown in the example in section 9.1. When running a second Q-Blue process, the process of checking the work and replies directories for different files may not produce the results you expect, because it’s using different directory names. For instance, it may check the second replies directory and find files there that are many days out of date.

8.3) Decompression and loading of mail

Q-Blue will next attempt to decompress the mail packet. A console window labeled Packer command output will be opened, and the decompression command will be executed. The window will open on Q-Blue’s screen. The command is written at the top of the console window before executing it, so you can see exactly what it was. This can be useful if the command fails to work correctly. Section 5 describes how to configure the decompression commands. If the command runs okay and returns zero, Q-Blue will close the window as soon as it’s done and try to read the unpacked files, loading the message information into memory. If the command produces a nonzero return code, indicating a possible error, Q-Blue will write a message in the window saying, “Error detected?  Press return to close window:” and wait for you to type a return with that window active. This is so that you can study any error messages shown in the window before it disappears.

Note that there is no way for Q-Blue to be certain about whether a genuine error has occurred. In fact, there may be some cases in which a drastic error can go unnoticed. Because of these possibilities and the unpredictable behavior of unknown compression programs, when it detects an apparent error in the unpacking, it tries to go ahead as if it were successful, just to see whether it works or not. If the unpacking really failed, it will probably report some other error a moment later, such as an incomplete or missing file in the work directory. Only a very obvious failure, such as being unable to open the console window, makes it give up.

Q-Blue is completely “deaf” to any input as long as this console window is open. It is unable to do anything else until the window is closed. This is indicated by the mouse pointer showing as a clock face whenever the backdrop window is active.

Once the packet’s files are in the work directory, either by decompression of a mail packet or because Q-Blue found the files already there, it begins reading the contents of the packet. At this point, if it came from a Blue Wave mail door it may require a password before you can read it, depending on what options you chose in the mail door. A small window containing a string gadget will appear, prompting you for the password. This string gadget is unusual in that you can’t see the word you are typing into it. The cursor moves normally but the text is invisible — it’s displayed in letters the same color as the background. You get three chances to type in the right password. If you fail, the packet is closed. Letter case is ignored in the password.

If all of this happens without error, Q-Blue will then scan the files and create lists in memory of all the readable messages. The mail is now ready to be read, and will remain so until you give a Close command. But there are still more steps before the opening process is complete.

The first extra step is that Q-Blue checks the BBS Context directory for a “marks” file. If one exists that matches the packet you have just opened, then all the messages that you had read when the packet was previously opened will be marked as having been read, and your “current message” will be set to the last one you were reading instead of to the first message in the packet. This allows you to close a packet and reopen it later, picking up just where you left off. The marks files are saved when you close a packet or quit Q-Blue, and also whenever you write a reply or pack replies. If you have to reboot the machine while a packet is open, the marks file information may be out of date when you reopen the packet, but hopefully not too badly if you’ve been writing replies. If something goes wrong with the process of checking for a marks file, you can still read the mail normally.

Another extra step that Q-Blue may take is to save a “pointer” file from the packet in the context directory. Typically this file is named SOMENAME.PTR or SOMENAME.PNT, where SOMENAME is the BBS’s packet ID. With some BBSes the name may be SOMENAME.LMR, SOMENAME.SFP, or SOMENAME.PTN — the latter being the case for the Valence door on Searchlight BBSes, which actually includes two pointer files in its packets, the other being named SOMENAME.PTN. Q-Blue only saves the .PTO file. The mail doors that include these files have a feature that allows you to rewind the current high-message pointers for the areas you are reading by uploading this file. If a packet gets lost before you can read it, uploading this file will rewind the pointers to where they were at the time you downloaded the packet that the pointer file came from. In the case of Valence you may have to rename the .PTO file to SOMENAME.PTR before uploading it.

Q-Blue then has to deal with the question of whether there are replies to be reloaded. The section after next covers this.

8.4) “Opening” with no mail packet

If instead of giving some version of the Open packet command you use the Open (no packet) menu option or the No pkt. gadget (key shortcut N), then what happens is similar to the above but simpler. A list window opens which is similar to the one used by Open packet, titled “Select BBS file to open -- enter or double-click”. It lists files in much the same way that the Open packet list window shows mail packets, except that the files shown are “BBS files” stored in Q-Blue’s BBS context directory. These files are created whenever you open a downloaded packet. Information from the packet is copied to a BBS file, unless the packet is older than an already existing BBS file. These files consist of copies of files found in the mail packet: the CONTROL.DAT file in the case of a QWK packet, or in a Blue Wave packet, the WHATEVER.INF file (where WHATEVER is the packet name used by the BBS). As with the other file list window, the ASL file requester can be used to augment this list window, so you can select BBS files in any directory. The BBS file is a legible text file in the case of QWK packets, but the Blue Wave BBS file is illegible binary data. Some of these files have some extra information stored in their filenotes. For everything to work as well as it should, do not change the filenotes on any of the files in your BBS context directory. The files shown in the list window have names that end either in “.BBS-QWK” or “.BBS-BW”, with the part before the period being the packet ID name for the BBS, which is usually the same as the name used by the download packet. The part after the dash tells you whether this BBS file came from a QWK or Blue Wave mail packet. It is usually obvious which file came from which BBS that you have called. Each one will be marked old or NEW along the left edge if there appears to be a corresponding reply packet in your uploads directory — usually old, meaning that the BBS file predates the reply packet — as described in section 7.5. Each file’s size and creation date is also listed. Filenotes, which in the case of real mail packets are used to note what percentage of a mail packet you have read so far, are not listed for BBS files.

If you select a file that has been given some name other than the standard names shown in the files list window, Q-Blue will correctly figure out whether it is QWK or Blue Wave, and if it is QWK, will learn the correct packet name for creating replies with. But if it is Blue Wave, it usually has to take the packet ID from the name of the file you open. For instance, if you open a file named FLARP.FOO it will assume that the packet name is FLARP. If the file was originally named GLOOT.INF and you renamed it, then it will create replies that the BBS can’t read, because it does not know that the correct packet name is GLOOT. This problem is corrected in version 3 Blue Wave doors, but in most cases you should avoid renaming Blue Wave BBS files.

Once you select a valid BBS file to open, Q-Blue will essentially pretend to open a mail packet from the same source. But there is no decompression step, it does not make any use your work directory, and no mail is made available to read. Instead, after opening, it will display a single empty “placeholder” message, in the area for bulletins and other special files.

Once the messages have been scanned or the placeholder message is created, the handling of replies proceeds identically for both BBS files and real mail packets.

8.5) Reloading unfinished replies

What happens next depends on whether Q-Blue saw any other file that appeared to be a reply packet for the selected download packet or BBS file, and whether the replies directory contains unpacked files that appear to be replies matching the packet just loaded. It looks for reply packets only in the uploads directory you specified in your setup, and looks only at the names of such files to pick out apparent matches, not at their contents. For instance, if you select a file named WHATEVER.QWK to be opened, it will assume that WHATEVER.REP contains replies to it. Similarly, for Blue Wave packets, if you pick SOMENAME.WE1, it will look for a reply packet named SOMENAME.NEW. If you select a file from the list window without using the ASL file requester, each file listed will be labeled, as noted below in section 7.5, to indicate whether an apparent reply packet exists and whether the mail packet is older or newer than the reply packet corresponding to it.

Once the mail packet or BBS file is open, it will recheck the uploads directory again to make sure whether or not a file with the right name for a reply packet is there. It checks twice because it may discover, after the packet is open, that the correct name for the reply packet is not what it seemed to be from just looking at the name of the message packet. This feature allows message packets to be renamed without losing the ability to find the right reply packet — though the files list window may fail to tell you about it in that case. But this version of Q-Blue has no method of opening a reply packet that is named differently from the name it was created with, or not in the uploads directory. In other words, you can safely rename message packets but not reply packets.

If replies are found already present in the replies directory (in uncompressed form), it will open a requester asking you whether you want to reload those replies or start fresh. If a compressed upload packet is found, it asks you whether to unpack it. If an upload packet and files in the replies directory are both present, it gives you a three way choice of whether to try to load the existing files, delete them and uncompress the upload packet, or ignore them both so that you start with a clean slate; the three choices are labeled Reload, Unpack, and Ignore.

Note that except in the case of reloading existing reply files found in the replies directory, Q-Blue will delete all files in the replies directory before continuing. Like the work directory, the replies directory must not be used to store any permanent files. If you have no replies directory defined at all, it will still let you open the packet, and if a reply packet exists, it will put up an error message saying there’s no place to unpack it.

When it asks you whether to unpack or reload replies, the default selection depends on the ages of the different files. If the replies are in files with a datestamp newer than the packet that was just opened, Q-Blue assumes that this set of replies belongs to the current mail packet and is unfinished, and the default is to reload or unpack them. If the mail packet is newer than the replies, it assumes that these replies are for a previous mail packet from the same BBS, which have probably already been uploaded, and the default is to ignore them and start fresh. If a compressed reply packet and replies already in your replies directory both exist, the default is to reload the ones in the replies directory if either of the two sets of replies is newer than the download packet, so long the upload packet is newer than the files in the replies directory by no more than 12 hours. In this case it assumes that the upload packet was probably made by packing these same reply files. But if the upload packet is more than 12 hours newer than the uncompressed replies, the default action is to decompress it. The same defaults apply when opening BBS files instead of mail packets. You may prefer to set the Flush reply dir at close option (see section 6.3) to avoid the confusion of such cases, and keep replies only in compressed form.

There is one “gotcha” about deciding which files are newer or older: sometimes if you download a mail packet from a time zone east of the one you live in, you may end up writing replies to a mail packet in which the files have datestamps that are still in the future by a couple of hours. If you write replies promptly, you may end up with a reply packet that is dated at an earlier time than the mail it was written in reply to. Especially if you are loading already unpacked mail in the work directory, this can cause the requester to be fooled and make Ignore the default, as if the replies were outdated.

If you run more than one Q-Blue process at one time, then as explained in section 3.5, the work and replies in use will not be the ones named in your Directories setup window, but will be “sibling” directories with digits added to the ends of their names. In the case of the replies directory, if you only run two Q-Blues at once on rare occasions, it may happen that the second replies directory contains old replies that are days or weeks out of date, which you do not want to reload. This is the reason for the 12 hour rule. Whenever you are running more than one Q-Blue process at a time, you have to take extra care when making decisions involving pre-existing files in the work or replies directories. If you have written a set of replies for a previous mail packet for the same BBS but not uploaded them, you can reload them and add more to them while replying to the current mail packet, so that all replies get uploaded together. In this case you would tell it to reload replies though the default is not to. And if you know that you are not going to upload these replies until after another download, you can “leave a note to yourself”, reminding you to reload them instead of discarding them, by setting the newly created upload packet’s datestamp a few days in the future. This way, the next time you open another packet from that BBS, if the future date has not passed yet, Q-Blue will make reopening the packet the default selection.

This can be done with the AmigaDOS “SetDate” command, or with a small residentable command called “Future” that is included in the “c” drawer of the Q-Blue distribution (which has no icon). This command’s template is “FILE/A,DAYS/N”: you give it a filename and the number of days into the future (or the past, with a negative number) to set its datestamp, relative to today’s date. The number is optional and defaults to 7: one week in the future. The time of day of the datestamp is not affected — only the day. It requires AmigaDOS 2.04 or newer.

If you tell it to unpack compressed replies, it will repeat the same unpacking operation it went through for the main packet: checking for compression type, opening the console window, and so on. If the reply packet was made in response to this same download packet, it should usually manage to sort out which replies were in response to which original messages within the packet. This process is not 100% reliable, especially not with QWK mail, but if it makes a mistake it will not cause any problems with the replies you upload. It only makes the Flip to reply command (see section 9.3) work incorrectly.

8.6) The “twit list” file

Every once in a while, you encounter a situation where somebody’s contribution to the mail you’re reading is just not worth seeing. It might be a trivial waste of time to read, or more often, it might be somebody who is deliberately obnoxious and tries to get others to respond equally obnoxiously. Now you can, of course, just decide not to read that person’s messages, but sometimes life is just more pleasant if you dispense with the temptation, and avoid seeing reminders of things that you have to make an effort to avoid. This is the purpose of the “twit list” feature. With it, you can select certain messages to be discarded from the mail packet before you ever see them.

If you are reading Blue Wave mail, it is often better to use the mail door’s “Filters” feature instead of Q-Blue’s twit list, because this removes unwanted mail before it is downloaded, so you don’t have to wait for your modem to download mail you aren’t going to read anyway. However, Q-Blue’s twit list may still be useful, because it can reject messages according to more precise criteria than the Blue Wave door can.

The most common way to reject mail is by specifying the name of the person who writes it. This is commonly known as “twitting” that person. Some offline readers allow you to discard all mail from a certain person; others discard mail both from and to that person, so you also don’t see people’s replies to the stuff you’re trying to avoid. Q-Blue allows either option, and several others that bring quite a bit of sophistication to this odd little feature which ideally shouldn’t need to exist at all.

The “twit list” is a text file called S:Q-Blue.twits. Q-Blue does not have a window full of fancy gadgets to control its contents — you have to create the file with a text editor, such as the one you use to write your replies with. Each line in this text file describes some group of messages to be rejected. In the simplest case, each line is simply someone’s name. Q-Blue examines each message at loading time, and if the name of the author matches one of the names in the twit list, that message is rejected. If you specify a name with no options, Q-Blue will reject messages from that person but not messages addressed to him. A line starting with a semicolon is ignored; you can add comment lines to the twit list file that way.

To control the more sophisticated options in the twit list, you add something extra to the beginning of the line: a few letters and possibly an exclamation point, followed by a colon, before the name. To reject messages both from and to a given name, put “FT:” before the name. To reject all messages with a given word or phrase in the subject line, put “S:” before the word or phrase. There are several other letters with special meanings. For even fancier uses, you can put a BBS ID and/or a message area name before the comma as well, each preceded by a comma. All of these options are explained in the next section. Space characters are ignored around the colon and commas.

At present, there is no facility for “twitting” messages in a packet that is already open. Q-Blue reads S:Q-Blue.twits each time you open a mail packet, so any changes you make to the file will take effect the next time you use the Open command.

8.7) Twit list options

The following is a list of all the letters you can put before the colon in a line in the twit list file, and how they affect the meaning of what comes after it:

F	reject all messages where the author’s name matches the rest of the line after the colon. This is the default if there is no colon before the name.
T	Reject all messages where the addressee’s name matches.
S	Reject messages in which the subject line, or any part of the subject line, matches.
O	Reject all messages from a given FidoNet style origin address. (This is a drastic measure.)

The next several options do not select messages to be rejected; instead, they modify the selection made by one of the methods listed above. They are generally combined with one or more of the above; if not, “F” is assumed:

Y	reject only messages addressed personally to you.
E	reject only messages not addressed personally to you.
P	reject only public messages, not private mail.
M	reject only private mail, not public messages.
!	do not reject these messages. This specifies exceptions to other sets of messages that are rejected.

Several letters can be combined in one line. For instance, the line “FSPY: John Smith” would reject all messages that are written by John Smith, or mention John Smith in the subject, but only if they are public messages addressed to you personally. The line “!T: Mary Jones” would prevent any messages addressed to Mary Jones from being rejected, even if they were written by John Smith. “Y” and “E” are opposites, and if both are specified, then neither will take effect. The same is true of “P” and “M”.

To specify that a line in the twit list file should apply to only one BBS, place the BBS ID before the colon, after a comma. For example, if the BBS ID is “SOMENAME”, such a line might read “FT, SOMENAME: Mary Jones”. The BBS ID, which is also known as the packet name, is the short name that is shown in quotes in the screen title bar when you are reading a packet from that BBS. It is also shown in the heading of the BBS Information requester (see section 9.3). In this case, messages from and to Mary Jones will only be removed when you read mail packets from that BBS — packets with names like SOMENAME.QWK or SOMENAME.SU1.

To further restrict a line so it applies to only one message area, put the area’s number or full name after a second comma, before the colon. For instance, to affect only the area named “RADIO” on this BBS, you could use “FT, SOMENAME, RADIO: John Smith”. In the case of Blue Wave packets, the name to use for the area is the short “area-tag”, not the full name. The area-tags are visible in the list window that you use for selecting an area for writing a message, or for adding or dropping areas to read when using the Mail door option (section 11.4). The full area name shown in the list window showing areas with messages to read (the one the Areas button brings up) is not the name to use, with Blue Wave packets. With QWK packets, this is the only name an area has — there is no separate area-tag. You can use the area’s number instead. You can, if desired, leave out the BBS ID by putting the two commas together; this should not be done carelessly, and should only be done if you specify the area with a name instead of a number.

The “O” option is a special case. It is useful only in fairly extreme circumstances, and somewhat costly to use, since it significantly slows down the whole process of loading a message packet. In this case, what you put after the colon is a FidoNet-style network address in Zone:Net/Node.Point form, for example “O: 1:2345/678.9”. As usual, the decimal point and the number after it can be left out if it’s zero. Any message which has an “Origin line” showing this address will be rejected. You would use this in a situation where a BBS’s entire population of users is not worth reading. If there are a few people in the group you still want to read, you can make exceptions for them with “!F:”.

Q-Blue 1.0 allowed BBS ID names to be specified only in “O:” lines, and expected them after the colon instead of before, followed by a comma. A line like “O: SOMENAME, 1:2345/678.9” would make sense to Q-Blue 1.0. Version 2.4 still accepts this syntax, for compatibility.

8.8) Twit list examples

Some examples will clarify the uses of these options. First, say that you simply don’t want to hear another word from John Smith, because he does nothing but expound Republicanism. You would put a line in the file S:Q-Blue.twits that simply says “John Smith”, or “F: John Smith” if you want to be fancy. Let’s say that someone who calls himself “k0deZ KinG” is so offensive that you don’t want to hear from him, or see what anyone says back to him either. You would add a line that reads “FT: k0dez king”. (Note that the twit list never distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase letters.) If you don’t even want to read messages about him, try “FTS: k0dez king”.

Suppose there’s a long tiresome debate going on about one of those perennial controversies that nobody changes anyone’s mind about, for instance gun control. There are lots of long, argumentative messages with titles like “Re: Traitorous gun control fascists” and “Beer guzzling pinhead gun fondlers”, and you finally want to just skip over any message that has the word “gun” in the subject. You would put the line “S: gun” in the twit list. Or if the bad messages are mostly confined to an area called “POLITICS” of a BBS called “MYBBS”, you could use “S, MYBBS, POLITICS: gun”.

Suppose this John Smith person that you normally don’t want to hear from occasionally sends you a private message, and you do want to see those. In this case you would use “FP: John Smith”, which would reject only public messages. Another possibility is to use two lines: the first being simply “John Smith” (or anything else that removes his stuff) and the second being “!M: John Smith”. The “!” says that this is an exception to the normal rule. Any private message from John Smith (the “M” means private mail only is affected) gets left in place even if some other line would reject it.

Suppose someone named Mary Jones has taken to addressing many unpleasant messages to you, but there’s no need to reject what she says to others. You would use “FY: Mary Jones”, or simply “Y: Mary Jones”. On the other hand, suppose you want the opposite effect: ignoring Mary Jones most of the time, but paying attention if she’s speaking directly to you. In this case you would use “E: Mary Jones”.

Suppose that you’re reading mail from some network that includes a BBS dedicated to one particular cause or fad, and everyone on it is a tiresome fanatic on some subject you don’t care about. Or suppose that someone who deserves twitting has his own BBS, or perhaps a point system, and sends out messages under many different names. (This was the situation that drove me to create the feature.) You get mail from that place only when you download mail packets from “Joe’s BBS”, which is your local member of the same network. If the BBS ID of the mail you download is “JOES_BBS”, and the address within that network of the BBS to be rejected is 57:69/42, then you would add the line “O, JOES_BBS: 57:69/42” to the twit list file. If John Smith and Mary Jones are users on that BBS who are exceptions to the general rule, you could let them through with two lines reading “!: John Smith” and “!: Mary Jones”. Replies addressed to that BBS are not filtered; if they become a problem, you’ll have to reject them by the names of the recipients.

Or suppose that you are reading an echo devoted to some particular religion, and somebody connects a BBS full of hostile nonbelievers to that echo. You want to reject all their messages, but not in other message areas, because some of them are sensible on other topics. Furthermore, you read this echo on more than one BBS sometimes, but the name of the echo is, in all cases (let us say) “MYRELIGION”. If the offending BBS has the origin address of 42:57/69, the line to use would be “O,, MYRELIGION: 42:57/69”. Normally you should specify a BBS ID with the “O” option whenever possible, to avoid slowing down the loading of other packets. If there are two BBSes you read the MYRELIGION echo in, you can use one line for each of their BBS IDs, and avoid impeding the reading of other mail. This is also necessary if the two BBSes do not use the same name for the message area.

Most people’s twit lists are very short, usually only one or two lines. In fact, users who have a twit list at all are in the minority. If you start feeling a need to filter ten or twelve categories of messages out of your mail, maybe it’s time to take up a different hobby instead of BBSing.

9) READING MESSAGES

9.1) What you see when reading a message

After opening a packet, once you pick an area and, if necessary, close the list window showing messages in that area, you are finally reading the messages. This is the state that Q-Blue will be in during most of the time you spend using it. The screen’s title bar now shows the packet name, or BBS ID, of the mail packet you are reading. If you are reading a special message area, such as bulletin files, personal messages, or your replies, that is also indicated in the title bar, in a form like this (where WHATEVER stands for the current packet name):

Q-Blue 2.4: reading "WHATEVER" -- YOUR REPLIES

The current time will also be shown at the far right end of the screen title bar. Due to awkward features of Amiga Intuition, the time is not shown if Q-Blue’s screen is not active, or if no mail packet is open. If you are running more than one Q-Blue process, there will be a number at the beginning of the title bar for all except the first one you started, like this:

(1) Q-Blue 2.4: reading "WHATEVER" -- YOUR REPLIES

When this number is showing, it means that this instance of Q-Blue is using different work and replies directories than usual — the number that shows is added to the end of the directory names, as described in section 3.5. It is also using a different public screen name, as described in section 4.2.

Just below the title bar is a box, which in the default palette is blue with a red border, which contains information about the message you are currently reading. To be specific, along the left side are items labeled From:, To:, Subj.:, and Area:. After these are listed, respectively, the name (or alias) of the message’s author, the name of the intended recipient, a line indicating the message’s topic, and the name (in long form) of the message area it was posted in.

On the right side, you’ll see Date: and Msg#:. The former tells the date and time at which the message was written. After Msg#:, up to three numbers may be shown. The one shown in yellow in the default palette, which is always present, is the sequential number that this message has been assigned by the BBS. The other numbers, which may be absent, are cyan in the default palette. If this is a reply to an earlier message, then the number of that earlier message is shown before the current message’s number, with “<-” in between. If some later message is a reply to this one, then that one’s number is shown after, with “->” in between. For example, if it says “419 <- 425 -> 428”, it means that this is message 425, which is a reply to number 419, and that number 428 is a reply to this one. If the message shown is one of your replies to be uploaded, it says reply to followed by the number of the message you wrote this in answer to, or new message if this is a newly written message which is not a reply to anything.

If the message is an Internet email reply with a very long name in the To: field, the Msg#: part will be left out to make room. This also happens if it is an outgoing newsgroup post with a long list of other groups that the message is crossposted to (see section 10.8).

At the lower right of the box at the top of the screen, after the area name, are two other numbers showing how many messages in this area were found in this mail packet, and which one this is. For example, “#2 of 5” means that this is the second of five messages found in this area. Along the right edge there may be three other special words shown against a contrasting background color. If the word Priv is present, this message is marked as private, to be read only by the recipient named in the To: line. If Rcvd is shown, it means that the addressee has read (or at least downloaded) this message. Repl means that you have written a reply to this message yourself, which is now in the replies area. Repl is also shown when such a reply is itself on the screen.

The content of the message is shown in the large area below the bordered box. Normal text is shown in white in the default palette, and lines that have a quote indicator at the beginning such as “>” or “XX>” are shown in yellow, so that (with luck) you can see at a glance which words are new and which are repeated from past messages. Sometimes quotes are indicated by lines that begin with “:” or “|”; Q-Blue will show such lines in yellow if there are ten or more in the message, or three or more that are consecutive. The clutter of origin lines, tear lines, seen-by lines, advertising lines for various mail processing software, and supposedly funny taglines at the bottom of the message is all dull magenta, which makes it easy for the eye to skip over them without having to read any of it. Note that its decisions about which lines should be colored magenta are guesswork, and far from infallible. Occasionally some “kluge lines” used by FidoNet are shown in magenta at the top of the message text. If the message has “RFC” control lines at the top, as is usually the case with Internet messages, these lines are shown in cyan. Again, the detection of these lines may involve guesswork. The end of the text is marked with a horizontal stripe which is red in the default palette, so you can tell when there is no more text below the bottom of the screen.

If the message has an attached file, the first line of the text area gives the name of the file, highlighted with a red background. The message looks like this:

* Attached file: WHATEVER.ZIP (use Alt-T to save)

Section 9.4 covers the Alt-T command for saving attached files. Section 10.11 discusses attached files fully, describing how to add them to your uploaded messages.

9.2) Basic reading options

You can move around among the messages, and scroll long messages up and down, either entirely with the mouse or entirely with the keyboard, whichever you prefer at any moment. If the message is too long to all fit on the screen, you can scroll it up and down by holding down the left mouse button at the top or bottom edge of the text. When the mouse is within one line of the bottom edge of the text display area, or in amongst the gadgets at the bottom, the text will scroll upwards, adding new lines at the bottom. The text will scroll downwards if you click in the box at the top where the author’s name, subject, and so forth are displayed. If the screen is interlaced, or using any display mode which is 400 or more pixels tall, it will scroll two lines at a time, for quickness. You can change the direction of scrolling by sliding the mouse to the other end of the screen while the button is held down.

Clicking and dragging the mouse in the middle of the text causes the text dragged over to be copied to the system clipboard. To copy a chunk larger than what is visible, drag the mouse to the top or bottom edge of the text area with the left button held down, and it will scroll as described above. The area being clipped is displayed in inverse color until you release the mouse button, at which time it is copied to the clipboard. If you have a three button mouse, you can scroll the text without clipping by holding down the middle mouse button. It scrolls the same way the left mouse button does, but cannot select text for the clipboard or activate the gadgets at the bottom of the screen. There is no keyboard method for copying text to the clipboard.

If you prefer to use the keyboard, you can scroll a long message up one line with the down arrow key, or down one line with the up arrow key. Either the regular arrow keys or the IBM equivalents on the numeric pad (2 and 8) work. The PgDn key (numeric pad 3) moves the message down to show the next screenful of lines, with one line of overlap; that is, the line that was previously at the bottom is now at the top. PgUp (numeric pad 9) displays the previous screenful of lines. Pressing an up arrow or down arrow key while holding down a shift or Alt key is equivalent to pressing PgUp or PgDn. Pressing Home (numeric pad 7>) shows the first line of the message, and pressing End (numeric pad 1) shows the last line. Pressing the up arrow or down arrow keys while holding down the Ctrl key are equivalent to Home and End, respectively. This way, Amiga 600 owners with no numeric pad aren’t missing any options. The keys for scrolling long messages are identical to those used for scrolling list windows.

If the message currently shown has more text beyond what shows at the bottom of the screen, pressing the space bar will display the next screenful just like the PgDn key. If the end of the message is visible (this is indicated by a red stripe below the last line of text), the space bar will show the start of the next message like the right arrow key. If the current message is the last one in the area, the space bar will open the window listing areas with messages, with the next area highlighted so that pressing the space bar selects it — or, if you have Areas: list before reading turned off in the Options setup window (see section 6.3), then it will display the first message in the next area. If the Msgs: list before reading is on, the list of messages in the new area will open when you enter it. If you have already read some of the messages in the new area, it will display the last one you read there, instead of the first.

What this means is that you can read every message consecutively just by pressing the space bar. The return key and the numeric pad Enter key do the same thing. The backspace key does this in reverse, more or less: it shows the previous screenful, or the previous message, or opening the list window of readable areas with the previous area highlighted. Alt-spacebar works the same as backspace.

To view the next message, you can click the gadget labeled Next at the lower right corner of the screen. The gadget just to the left of that, labeled Prev., will show you the message before this one. If you click Next when viewing the last message in the area, or Prev. when viewing the first, the list window showing the message areas will open, if you have Areas: list before reading checked in the Options setup window. This works just as described above for the space bar. The window will open with the area just after (or, in the case of Prev., just before) the one you were reading highlighted. The keyboard equivalent is to press the right arrow key to view the next message, or the left arrow key to see the previous one, as shown by the arrow signs on the two gadgets. The IBM numeric pad equivalents are 6 for right arrow and 4 for left arrow.

You can open the window to select another area any time by clicking the gadget labeled Areas at the center of the screen’s bottom edge, or using the equivalent Areas with msgs item in the Messages menu. The key shortcut is the letter A. You can open the window listing messages within the area with the List gadget just to the right of that (keyboard shortcut L), or the equivalent List area’s msgs menu item. And when either of these windows is open you can select the other.

To write a reply to the message you are reading, you can click the Reply gadget. To write a new message that is not a reply, click on Write. The keyboard shortcuts are R and W. If you are viewing one of your own replies, the Reply gadget is replaced with Re-edit. This is used if you want to change the contents of a reply you have already created. The equivalent menu items are labeled Reply to this msg (or Re-edit reply) and Write new message, in the Replies menu. The Reply to addressee, Write new email, and Carbon copy commands are variations of these. Reply to addressee is just like Reply to this msg except that it addresses the reply to the recipient, rather than the author, of the message you are replying to. Its key shortcut is E. The second is a shortcut for selecting Write new message followed by clicking the @-email button — it puts the message you write into the Internet email area. If there is no such area, it is ghosted. Its key shortcut is the @ sign. Carbon copy lets you create a new message with text copied from an existing one, either a message you are reading or one of your own replies. Its key shortcut is Alt-W. The details of writing messages are covered in section 10.

9.3) Special features available when reading

The Messages and Replies menus, besides containing items equivalent to the various buttons, also have several commands not available as gadgets. The Next area option at the top of the Messages menu shows messages in the message area immediately after the one you have been reading, without opening any list windows. It shows the first message in the area, or the last message you read in the area if you have been in it before. The keyboard shortcut is the right square bracket: ]. And the Previous area selection goes back to the area before the one you are now reading — the shortcut is [.

The next items are Search for words and Undo search. The latter has two subitems. These are described in sections 9.5 and 9.6, which cover the search feature. Fifth and sixth are Print message and Save msg / attachment, which has four subitems. These are covered in the next section, 9.4.

The next two items are called Next unread (wraps) and Mark as unread. The key shortcut for the first is N. (This is the same key used for Open (no packet), but that item is not available when a packet is open, so they don’t conflict.) Next unread searches forward and puts on screen the first message after the current one which you have not looked at yet. If there are none after the current message, it starts from the beginning of the packet. If every single message in the packet has been read, it tells you so with a little error requester. If you have skipped over some messages, this command is a good way to go back and review them.

But note that if you read the first couple of lines of a message and then skip the rest, Q-Blue will count the message as having been read. This command will show this message only if it has never been onscreen... unless you use the Mark as unread command, or its key shortcut, X. This causes Q-Blue to forget that the current message was ever onscreen. If you are reading a message and don’t finish it, but want to look at it again later, use Mark as unread. You will see the message indicated as unread in the list windows, and Next unread (wraps) can find it.

Last in this menu are Areas with msgs and List area’s msgs, which are, as stated in the previous section, equivalent to the Areas and List gadgets at the bottom of the screen. They open the list windows showing areas with readable messages, or messages within one area, respectively.

The first item in the Replies menu is Flip to reply; the F key is equivalent. If you have not replied to the message that is currently on screen, this item is ghosted and the F key does nothing. If there is a reply, then this will put that reply on screen, replacing the message you were reading before. (The word Repl near the right edge of the bordered box at the top of the screen indicates whether there is a reply for F to flip to.) When reading replies, the menu item becomes Flip to original, and it sends you back to the message that the one you are reading was written in reply to. If the message you replied to was addressed to you, it will flip to either the copy in the personal area or the copy in the regular message areas, depending on which was on screen most recently, so pressing F twice will put you back where you started.

The second Replies item is always ghosted except when you are reading one of your own replies. This item is Delete reply. The keyboard shortcut is the Del key, or the letter D (as used in older versions of Q-Blue). When you select this, the reply that you are reading will be marked as deleted, and will be erased from your replies directory. But it will still be retained in Q-Blue’s memory. The word DELETED will appear on a contrasting background in the message’s header, after the Msg#: label. When you are reading a deleted message, this menu item is changed to Un-delete reply, with the shortcut still being Del or D. By selecting it, the deleted reply will be un-marked as deleted and rewritten into the replies directory. You can un-delete a deleted message any time before you close the mail packet; at that time, deleted messages are forgotten.

If a file in your replies directory gets damaged somehow, deleting and then un-deleting the corresponding message — or in the case of QWK replies, any message — will rewrite a fresh copy of the file. In the case of Blue Wave, the header files such as the .UPL file get rewritten when any message is changed.

Next come the five message writing commands: Reply to this msg (or Re-edit reply when a reply is displayed onscreen), Reply to addressee, Write new message, Write new email, and Carbon copy, as mentioned in the previous section. Section 10 covers their use in detail. The last three items are Request D/L and Mail door, which are covered in section 11, and Maintain taglines.

Maintain taglines, key shortcut T, opens the same tagline window that opens when you use the Tagline gadget in the message writing window. It allows you to add or delete taglines, and load or save tagline files. Use of this window is covered in section 10.9. The main reason it is made available in the menu is for convenience in “stealing” taglines by clipping them with the mouse and then pasting them into the window’s string gadget, as explained at the end of section 10.9. When using this window via the Maintain taglines command, it does not matter which line is selected when you close the window, and double-clicking is ignored.

The remaining options while reading messages, besides the Setup menu items covered in sections 3 through 6, are found in the Packet menu. The Compression type submenu, Iconify screen, and About Q-Blue, were described in section 8.1, since they are available whether or not any packet is open. Close packet, Pack replies, and Quit Q-Blue are covered in sections 11.6 and 11.7. All of these are available while reading messages, but Open packet and Open (no packet) are not.

The class=uiBBS Information item in the Packet menu, shortcut B, opens a requester that lists some information about the BBS that created the mail packet you are reading. It gives the full pathname of the mail file or BBS file you opened — or “(unknown)” if you loaded mail files that were already in the work directory — followed by its creation date, the name of the BBS, the sysop’s name, and your logon name. In the case of Blue Wave mail it lists your alternate name, the BBS’s network address if any, and the netmail “credit” you have, if relevant. In the case of QWK mail, it lists the BBS’s city and phone number, and the control name used by the mail door for offline configuration, if any (see sections 11.4 and 11.5 for an explanation of this). Select Okay to close it. This item is disabled when no packet is open.

9.4) Saving and printing messages

The sixth item in the Messages menu is Save msg / attachment, which has four subitems: ask filename with key shortcut V (sorry about that, S is used for Search), append previous with key shortcut Alt-V, whole area, with key shortcut Alt-Ctrl-V (hold down both the Alt and Ctrl keys while pressing V), and Attached file with shortcut Alt-T. You can use either of the first two to make a copy, in a text file, of whatever message is presently on the screen. When you tell it to save a message to disk with the ask filename subitem or the V key, it opens a file requester which you use to specify where to save it. Unless you cancel the requester, the message will be written out to the specified file, with the header information (author, addressee, date, etc.) at the top, similarly to how it appears in the box at the top of the screen. The whole area subitem works the same way, except that instead of saving the current message on screen, it writes out all messages in the area that you’re currently reading, into one big text file.

After you select the file to save it in, another requester may appear, if the file is one that already exists. It gives you three choices: to append the current message onto the end of the existing file, to erase the previous contents of the file and replace them with this message, or don’t save the message after all. The gadgets are labeled Append, Replace, and Cancel. The default is to append. The file requester, after the first time it’s used, defaults to selecting the same file that you selected last time. It puts three blank lines in front of the message, when appending it onto an existing file. Note that if the file you select is not a text file, appending to it can make it unusable. For instance, if it is a program, it will not run any more. Be careful to only append to text files.

Bulletin files are handled a bit differently from messages. If you save a bulletin by itself, without appending it onto an existing file, then Q-Blue makes a binary copy of it rather than a “printout” type of listing of its text. If a binary file such as an LHA archive is included as an extra item in your mail packet, you can save it to disk in usable form with the V key, as long as you avoid appending it to an existing file. Such binary files will generally appear as gibberish when viewed onscreen. Using the whole area subitem counts as appending, so it does not make binary copies.

When you use Alt-V, or the append previous subitem, no requesters appear. The text is automatically appended to the file that was last selected with the ask filename or whole area subitem. A message appears in the screen title bar for four seconds, telling the name of the file appended to. Alt-V is a convenient way to write many messages into one text file. This option is not enabled unless you have used ask filename once. If ask filename is cancelled or encounters any errors in writing out the file, append prev. is again disabled until ask filename is used successfully. This requirement for using ask filename once is maintained even if a default filename is specified in the Path for saving messages string in the Directories setup window (see section 3.4).

The Attached file item is ghosted unless the current message has a file attached to it. Selecting this command or pressing Alt-T opens a file requester. The name of the file defaults to being the one it was given when it was attached (which is displayed at the top of the message); you have to pick the appropriate directory to put it in. The file is copied there when you okay the requester. With QWK packets, the file is generally present in your work directory under a temporary name different from the official name. With Blue Wave packets, there is currently no support for downloading attached files; only for uploading them. If an attached file is present, you would have to manually find it in the Bulletins area and save it from there. This is a feature of the Blue Wave format that was never really finished properly or supported in the original Blue Wave software; it’s one of the few areas where QWK is better.

The fifth Messages menu item is Print message, shortcut Alt-P. This sends a copy of the current message to your printer. Or actually, it sends it to whatever filename is specified in the Printer output gadget in the Directories setup window, which defaults to “PRT:” (see section 3.4). If the message contains IBM high-ASCII characters, the Amiga printer driver will probably not show them correctly. If your printer is made for use with IBM compatible computers, as most are, you may get better results by sending your printer output to the printer’s port in raw form rather than through the printer driver, and making sure that your printer is correctly set up to print such characters rather than, for instance, interpreting them as italics. Setting the string gadget to “PAR:” will do this for printers connected to the built-in parallel port. Or you can specify a disk file name, if you wish to “print” to a file. If the file already exists, it will append to it. The effect is much like the append prev. subitem of Save msg as file, except that the filename is specified in the Directories setup window’s Printer output filename gadget.

When not appending to a file, printing is done by a background CLI process, and can continue after Q-Blue is exited. If you need to abort the print, you can’t do so from within Q-Blue. Go to a CLI window and give the command “Status”. Among the processes listed should be one that says “Loaded as command: COPY”. If the name “copy” is not in uppercase, then it is not the one started by Q-Blue. The COPY command launched by Q-Blue is the process that is actually feeding data to your printer. Just before those words will be the word “Process” and a number. For example, it might say “Process 5: Loaded as command: COPY”. Enter a “Break” command followed by that number, a space, and the letter C. In this example, the command would be “Break 5 C”. The process should disappear and printing should stop. But your printer might keep going for a while if it has already received a lot of text that it hasn’t printed yet. Note that if you specify PAR: or some other raw port handler instead of PRT:, the Copy command may wait around forever, in spite of “Break” commands, if the port is not ready to use — for instance, if your printer is turned off. This makes it more difficult to abort cleanly than it is when PRT: is used. The background process requires the “Failat” and “Delete” commands to be available, as well as “Copy”.

As with the append previous save command, a message appears in the screen title bar for four seconds. If you give a disk filename, it will display the same message: Appended to followed by the filename. But when copying in the background to a device such as “PRT:”, the message says Copying to followed by the name.

9.5) The word search feature

Q-Blue has a rather sophisticated feature for finding messages according to whether they contain a given word or sequence of words. Unlike many search functions, it will find a sequence of words even if they are separated by line breaks or by spacing different from what you enter in the search window, or even XX> style quote marks. It also allows you to control exactly where it looks to find the given words: you can separately check the authors or addressees or subject lines or the main text of messages, and include or exclude the network gibberish at the bottom. Q-Blue 2.4 allows you to search for four different phrases at once. The effect is that messages which do not match the search temporarily disappear, until you undo the search.

Searching is controlled through a window which can be opened by pressing S or by the Search for words item of the Messages menu. The window has four string gadgets, where you can enter the phrases to search for. Consecutive searches leave these gadgets unchanged, so you may have to erase one of them if you no longer want to search for a second phrase.

Below the four string gadgets, next to the words Look in:, are four checkmark gadgets which tell it where it should look to find the given phrases, labeled From, To, Subj., and Body text. They can be switched between checked and unchecked with the keys F, T, S, and B. When From is checked, it will look at the name of who the message is from (the author). When To is checked, it will check the name the message is addressed to. Subj. tells it to check the subject or title string. Body text tells it to check the actual content of the message. You can set these four gadgets to any combination of checked and unchecked, though if all four are unchecked you’ll get an error message because it has nowhere to look. In the bulletins area, where the messages have no “from” or “to” names but do have a filename, it will check that filename for a match if either the From or To gadget is checked.

The default setting when the window is first opened is for Body text to be unchecked and the others to be checked. This is because searching the body text is a lot slower than searching any of the other parts. Searching a large number of messages can take many seconds, even if your work directory is in ram disk and you have a fast CPU. Searching with the body text option turned off, however, takes almost no time. The Waste memory for speed setup option (see section 6.3) can help speed up body text searches. However, the speedup will be less than it was in earlier Q-Blue releases if the area contains many messages, because that option is now much more modest in the amount of memory it wastes. During searches that include body text, the title of the search window shows how far the search has progressed so far, as a percentage of the total count of messages that need to be checked.

Below those four gadgets are two more checkmarks labeled Refine previous search and Ignore end-of-message clutter. Their shortcuts are R and I. They are explained in the next section.

At the bottom of the search window, next to the words Search area(s):, are three gadgets labeled Here, All, and Nowhere, with key shortcuts H, A, and N. They tell it which message areas it should search. As indicated by the bent arrow next to it, pressing return selects Here. That tells it to begin searching only the messages in the current area, leaving other areas alone. The All gadget tells it to check every message in every area, except for your replies.

The Nowhere gadget tells it not to search. It also tells it to discard the results of any past search. It is not the same as simply cancelling the window with the close gadget or Esc key — if you just cancel the window, any previous search will be left unaffected, but if you click Nowhere, it will bring back the complete set of messages as they were before any search was done. It acts like the all areas command in the Undo search submenu.

Once you select Here or All, it will start searching, after first discarding previous search results. If there are no messages that contain the phrases in the areas you’ve told it to search, it will put up a requester telling you that nothing was found. A side effect of this, in the current version, is that any previous search result is lost, either in the current area only if you selected Here, or in all areas if you selected All. A failed search has results similar to selecting Nowhere, except that the window stays open for another try. But if Refine previous search is used, it restores the previously existing search result instead of restoring an un-searched condition.

If it does find one or more messages that match the phrases you specified, the result is that all messages except the ones that match will temporarily disappear, in your current area or in all areas depending on where you searched. You can now read messages, reply, or do anything else in the normal way, except that the only messages you see are the ones that fit the search. When searching all areas, those areas which had no matching messages will also entirely disappear, temporarily. Q-Blue will do its best to keep its place in the remaining messages so you can more or less continue where you left off.

If your search included a check of body text, messages that were found that way will have the matching words or phrases highlighted with contrasting inverse colors when they are viewed. Q-Blue will highlight the first four non-overlapping occurrences of each matching phrase.

To bring back the vanished messages, you can reopen the search window and select Nowhere, or you can use the menu item below Search for words in the Messages menu, labeled Undo search. It has two subitems, this area and all areas. The first brings back the missing messages only in your current message area, the second brings all of them back. The key shortcut for this area is the letter U; for all areas it’s Alt-U.

9.6) Additional aspects of the search feature

The Ignore end-of-message clutter gadget, when checked, causes searches of body text to ignore the origin lines, tear lines, taglines, and other garbage that commonly ends up added to the ends of messages (or the beginnings, in the case of some Fidonet “Ctrl-A” kluge lines). The lines that are shown in magenta in the default 8 color palette are the ones that do not get searched. With this checked, you can for instance search for the phrase “Blue Wave” and only find messages that actually mention it, instead of finding every message that was posted by someone using Blue Wave software. It is ghosted except when Body text is checked.

The Refine previous search gadget is used if you want to search according to one criterion, and then search only the messages found that way, for some other unrelated phrase. For instance, suppose you want to find messages written by Mary Jones that mention President Clinton. There are dozens of messages by Mary Jones, and dozens about Clinton, and you want to find the few in both categories. What you would do is search once for “Mary Jones” with the From gadget checked. It will reduce the list of messages to be only those written by Mary Jones. Bring up the search window again, and replace “Mary Jones” with “Clinton” in the string gadget, and turn on the Subj. and/or Body text gadgets. Since the messages are already narrowed down by the previous search, the Refine previous search gadget will be enabled — it is ghosted when no previous search is in effect. Click it or press R, and then search again. It will look for messages containing “Clinton” among those messages that remain after the previous search: those written by Mary Jones. This gadget, unlike the other checkmarks, is always unchecked when the window is opened; it does not retain its previous setting.

The exact relation between the phrases you enter into the string gadgets and the text it finds needs some explanation. As mentioned above, it searches not for one string of characters but for a sequence of distinct words and punctuation marks. If it finds the given sequence, regardless of spacing or line breaks between them, it counts that as a successful find. It will even skip over XX> style quote marks at the beginnings of lines, if necessary, between one matching word and the next. In other words, if the message contains these lines:

JS> > And I thought it was really super-
JS> > DUPER !!!

then if you search for “super-duper!”, these lines will match. It always ignores the distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters — at least with the normal 26 letter alphabet. It cannot ignore the case of accented, umlauted, or otherwise unusual letters, because of the different incompatible character sets that different systems use to represent such characters.

It will find a phrase starting or ending in the middle of a word, unless you begin or end the phrase in the string gadget with an extra space. If a word in the string gadget has a space on both ends, it will find it only as a whole word in the text, not as a part of a larger word. This works separately for the beginning and end of the word — a space at the beginning makes it avoid matches starting in the middle of a word, and a space at the end makes it avoid those ending in the middle of a word.

An example may clarify this. If you enter “car” into one of the string gadgets with no spaces, it will find messages containing the words “carpet” and “vicar” and “escargot”. If you put a space before the word “car” it will skip “vicar” and “escargot” but still find “carpet”. Conversely, a space at the end will cause it to find “vicar” but not the others. Spaces at both ends make it find only the word “car”. But this does not mean it literally searches for the word “car” with space characters before and after — it will also find the word if it is bracketed by newlines or punctuation characters. It will find “(car)” for instance. When there are several words in a search string, the ones in the middle must always match as whole words — these considerations apply only to the beginning of the first word and the end of the last word.

You can use the search window while any list window is open. The third gadget from the left at the bottom of the screen is labeled Search whenever a list window is open, to make it convenient. With the list windows for messages in one area, or areas containing readable messages, it works exactly the same as when no list window is open. The list window will be updated to show the new set of messages available to read. In the case of the areas window, any area which has been searched is marked with a letter S along the left margin. And just as when no list window is open, pressing U undoes the search in the current area, and Alt-U undoes it in all areas. When a list window has had its contents screened through a search, the word “[Searched]” in brackets appears at the beginning of the window’s title. In the case of the areas list window, this word appears if you do a search of all areas (which removes any area with no matching messages) but not if you search individual areas.

A simplified search function can be used on any other list window besides those that list readable messages. When you are looking at the list of mail packet files in your downloads directory, or at the list of areas in which replies and new messages can be posted (see section 10.4), or the list of taglines or any other similar window, you can search the list to find an item by name. This is useful with some BBSes which give you a choice of hundreds or even thousands of message areas to post in. You can enter the name, or a part of the name, of the area you are trying to find in the search window, and the contents of the list will be narrowed down to just those that contain the word or phrase you specified, so you don’t have to hunt back and forth through a long list to find the right area. You can bring back the full list with the search window’s Nowhere gadget, or by pressing U or Alt-U while the search window is not open. With these other windows, U and Alt-U have the same meaning.

When doing this kind of simplified list window search, the From, To, Subj., Body text, and Ignore end-of-message clutter checkmark gadgets are ghosted since they are not relevant. The All gadget is also ghosted, and the default gadget is labeled Window instead of Here, to indicate that it is looking only at the text that is visible in the window. The shortcut is W instead of H. The Refine previous search option is available as usual, though. In the case of the downloads directory files window or BBS files window, the search looks at the names of the files, and the filenotes — which usually only contain a notation such as “27% read” — not at anything else in the window such as the date and time or the size of the file. In the window of areas you can post in, it will check both the numbers and the names.

10) WRITING REPLIES AND NEW MESSAGES

10.1) The message creation window: From, To, Subject

When you tell Q-Blue that you want to write a reply or a new message, or carbon-copy a message, it opens a window with a bunch of gadgets for specifying things about the message. There are string gadgets for specifying the message’s author (your name or alias), addressee, and subject, gadgets for specifying whether it is a private message and what area it will be posted in and so on, and buttons to edit the text, select a tagline, save the finished message, or cancel it. You can also cancel it with the close gadget or the Esc key.

The string gadget labeled From: specifies the message’s author. When reading a Blue Wave packet, this gadget is usually ghosted and you can’t change the name in it. The actual content may depend on what area is selected; some areas use your real name (as known to the BBS), and others may use an alias or handle, if the BBS knows of one. The exception is when the area the message is in is marked as allowing you to use any name you want. In this case you can put anything in there, with the default value being the default alias name you chose in the Replying setup window, or the equivalent gadget in the BBS Local setup window, or if you left those blank, your logon name on the BBS. Note: if you erase the gadget and press return in it when it’s empty, your logon name will be inserted, rather than the any name default. When reading a QWK packet, you can put any name into this gadget, but it will probably have no effect; the mail door will usually fill in your real name or handle as it deems appropriate. And some mail doors, it is said, will reject messages if they don’t like the name you put here. The Handle gadget (see the next section) can be used to conveniently switch between your name and alias(es).

The To: gadget specifies who the message is addressed to. If it is a reply, then the default is normally the author of the message you are replying to, unless you used Reply to addressee, in which case the default is the recipient of the message you are replying to. That is, if John Smith wrote a message to Mary Jones and you reply to it, then normally your reply would be addressed to John Smith, but with Reply to addressee your reply would go to Mary Jones instead. When writing an original message, this gadget starts out empty. You must put something into it, or Q-Blue will refuse to accept the resulting message — unless you have activated the Permit blank To and Subject option in the BBS Local setup window. If you just press return in this gadget when it’s empty, it will be set to All, unless the cycle gadget labeled Privacy (see below, in this section) is set to Private. If you are reading QWK mail, the From: and To: names may both get converted to uppercase, if the messages you have downloaded use uppercase names.

The Subj.: gadget lets you specify the title or subject line that appears at the top of the message. In a Blue Wave packet, this string can be longer than what fits in the visible area of the gadget — up to 71 characters, depending on the BBS. With QWK, this string, like the two name strings above it, is generally limited to 25 characters. If this is a reply, the default is to use the subject of the message being replied to, with Re: added in front if you have the Add Re: gadget checked in the Options setup window. If it’s an original message, it starts out empty. Again, you must put something into it for the message to be accepted, unless Permit blank To and Subject is used. When you use the Carbon copy command, the subject gadget starts out containing the same text as the message being copied, and no “Re:” is added. The To gadget starts out blank.

One exception to the rule that QWK subject lines are limited to 25 characters is when the mail packet contains special “kluge lines” compatible with those used by the BBS software PCBoard 15.0 and later, which allows subjects up to 60 characters long to be specified in a special format at the top of the message text. This option is activated by the Use PCBoard extensions checkmark gadget in the Mail subwindow of the BBS Local setup window. If any such kluge line is found in the mail packet without an origin line indicating it came from another system, or if the file DOOR.ID is present in the packet and contains a like saying “SYSTEM = PCBoard 15.0” (or any higher version number), or the QWK packet was produced by PCBoard’s built-in QWK packer, then Q-Blue will set this checkmark by guesswork, without changing the permanent setting. If you manually turn it on or off and use the BBS Local window’s Save button, Q-Blue will not try to use guesswork any more. If the option is set, you can use up to 60 characters in the subject string gadget, and create the “kluge line” in the uploaded message if necessary.

Important note: often other software that deals with the message will not correctly understand this, and in these cases it is necessary to avoid subjects longer than 25 characters (the same length as the From and To names) to avoid causing problems. This especially applies in any situation that requires some special information to be in the first line of the message, which is a common way for PCBoard systems to deal with problems like specifying the destination address for private mail sent over a network such as FidoNet or the Internet. It may be the case that if your subject is longer than 25 characters, the other software will be unable to figure out where the message is supposed to go.

Hopefully upgrades of these programs will resolve the problem eventually. Because of these problems, Q-Blue is careful not to stretch a PCBoard subject over the 25 character limit when it adds “Re:” to the beginning, if it is acting by guesswork in using the kluge lines. And when QWK netmail is handled with the QWK netmail kluge line method described in section 6.9, Q-Blue restricts the subject to 25 characters with PCBoard. In other cases, don’t be surprised if a long subject gets truncated when you reply by netmail. This applies only if you have specified a QWK netmail kluge line string, not if you set the Use PCBoard extensions checkmark and leave the kluge line gadget empty.

Some other mail doors that allow long subject lines are the Valence door for Searchlight, which permits subjects up to 40 characters long in all cases, and the MKQWK and JC-QWK doors for Remote Access, which allow a subject of 71 characters on netmail messages, but not on ordinary posts. JC-QWK, according to its manual, supports this with internet email also, though MKQWK does not. In this case, don’t be surprised if the subject gets truncated when you move a netmail message into a public area. The OLMS door for Remote Access supports 71 character subjects in all areas.

10.2) Other message creation gadgets

The cycle gadget in the upper right of the window, labeled Quoting, specifies how the message being replied to will be quoted when sent to the editor. The possible values are those explained in section 6.4: “Add >” which puts a greater-than sign at the beginning of each line, “Add XX>” which adds a greater-than sign after the author’s initials at the beginning of each line that doesn’t already have different initials, “Wrap XX>” which does the same and also reformats paragraphs, “Verbatim” which puts the message being replied to into the editor without any modification, and “None” which does not send anything from the message being replied to into the editor. The default setting of this gadget is determined by the identical cycle gadget in the Replying setup window. When writing an original message rather than a reply, this gadget is ghosted. A carbon copy is treated as a reply if the message being copied is one of your replies.

The key shortcut is Q. If you are using an editor setup with only one editing command instead of two, then the quote setting only affects the first use of the editor, and after using Edit the first time, the quote style gadget is ghosted.

Below that is a cycle gadget labeled Privacy: which tells whether the message is public or private. In the latter case, only the addressee (and probably the sysop) will be able to read it, on the BBS you upload it to. But be warned that if you post it in a networked message base, such as a FidoNet echo, the private-message flag may not have any effect. When reading a Blue Wave packet, some message areas allow only public messages, and others allow only private ones. Except when the area the message is being written into allows either one, this gadget is ghosted. Otherwise the default is for it to be private if the message you are replying to is private. The key shortcut is P. And bear in mind that no BBS mail is truly private unless you use encryption.

Below the subject string is a button labeled Area:. Clicking this, or pressing the A key while no string gadget is active, will open up a list window showing all the message areas into which you can put this message. See section 10.4 for details on using this window. Just to the right of this gadget is shown the number (in parentheses) and the full name of the area that the message is going to go into.

To the right of the area name is a button labeled Handle, with key shortcut H. If Q-Blue is aware of more than one name that you are using — a real name and an alias, or two aliases — then this button will change the contents of the From gadget (if it’s not ghosted) from one of your names to another. With QWK packets, the BBS only knows one name for you to use. With Blue Wave packets, the BBS tells Q-Blue about both your logon name and an alternate name. Generally one of these is your real name and the other (if different) is a handle, but which is which depends on the BBS. With both types of mail, the “default alias” you have selected within Q-Blue is another possible name for you, and the Handle gadget can switch the From gadget between all three kinds of names. If a default alias is defined in the BBS Local setup window, it overrides the setting in the Replying setup window.

On the left, under the Area: button, is a gadget labeled “@-email”, which is ghosted if there is no area marked for Internet email. To the right of that are a button labeled Netmail and a string gadget labeled Netmail address. These gadgets are ghosted if there is no message area designated for netmail. With Blue Wave packets, one or more areas may be marked as netmail areas automatically; with QWK packets you must specify which area is for netmail in the BBS Local setup window. With version 3 Blue Wave packets, there may be an area marked as Internet email, but with either QWK or version 2 Blue Wave, you must use the BBS Local setup window to specify the area, if the BBS has one. See sections 10.6 and 10.7 for details on creating netmail messages and section 10.8 on creating email messages.

To the right of the netmail address gadget, below the Handle button, is a button labeled FAttach. This is used for attaching a file to a message you write. Many BBSes do not support attaching files to messages. Section 10.11 discusses file attachment in detail.

In the bottom row, between the Edit button and the Cancel button, is the Tagline button. Taglines are covered in sections 10.9 and 10.10.

10.3) Editing and saving messages

At the bottom of the window are four gadgets. The one on the right is labeled Cancel (keyboard shortcut C) and is used to discard the message if you decide not to send it. The close gadget has the same effect, as does the Esc key. If you are re-editing an existing message, Cancel leaves it unchanged. On the left is Save (key shortcut S), which stores the finished message and closes the window. This gadget is ghosted if you have not yet used the editor to write anything, except with carbon copies.

To the right of the Save button in the window’s bottom row of gadgets is Edit (keyboard shortcut E), the one which makes the whole window worthwhile: it runs your editor to let you type in the text of your reply. (See section 4 for instructions on how to set up the editing commands used by this gadget.) Except when making a carbon copy, when the window is first opened there is a bent arrow next to this gadget, indicating that pressing return will start your editor. After the first time you edit the text, it moves the bent arrow next to the Save gadget, which is now no longer ghosted, and pressing return will save the message. When making a carbon, the arrow is next to Save in the first place.

If you are writing a new message, the text you are editing starts out empty, or empty except for the Signature you have specified in the Replying or BBS Local setup window (see section 6.5). If you are writing a reply, it starts out either empty or containing a quoted version of the message you are replying to, depending on your editor setup and quoting options (with signature, if any, in either case). If you are making a carbon copy, it starts out containing a copy of the text of the message you were reading when you gave the Carbon copy command, and no signature is added. It is not necessary to use Edit at all in this case, though you can if you wish. If the message you are copying is one of your own replies or new messages, the copy is verbatim. If it is a copy of a message that you downloaded, a header is added which tells who originally wrote the message, and so on. It looks something like this, by default:

 ** Message forwarded by Q-Blue 2.4
 ** Posted 10:36 AM on 1 Apr 97 in area "Politics"
 ** From John Smith to Mary Jones
 ** Subject "Limbaugh for President"

The original author’s and recipient’s name, and the original date, area name, and subject, are inserted in the appropriate places. To modify the format of this header, change the C.C. header string in the Replying setup window, as described in section 6.5.

It is not always the case that the message that Q-Blue uploads is exactly what you created in the editor. For instance, it will convert tab characters in your message into spaces. In Fido-type echomail areas — and note that with QWK mail, Q-Blue has to assume that any area might be an echo, unless the message you are sending is private — it will modify any line starting with three dashes and a space, or consisting of just three dashes, as these can confuse some mail sending software, sometimes resulting in a truncated message. And when creating replies for QWK format uploads, Q-Blue will add an extra line to the bottom called a “brag line”, giving the name and version number of Q-Blue that created the message, unless you select the Stealth tagline style.  Brag lines are discussed in section 6.7, because of the way they interact with the tagline style options documented there.

With Blue Wave format uploads, the mail door adds the brag line, so Q-Blue does not add one of its own. In this case, what Q-Blue does is see whether the message ends with a tagline — that is, a line starting with three periods and a space. When such a line is found at the end of the message, Q-Blue will put no newline at the end of the message, so that there is no blank line between the tagline and the mail door’s brag line. Although Q-Blue has its own facility for adding or changing such taglines at the ends of messages (see section 10.9), it will also react this way to a tagline that you simply type in at the end of a message. In QWK replies, it will avoid putting a blank line between such a tagline and its own brag line. In general, if you enter a message with a couple of blank lines at the end, Q-Blue will remove them. If there are lots of blank lines at the end, Q-Blue will remove a couple and leave the rest.

After you select Save, the message you just wrote will become the currently displayed message on screen if you are in the replies area, or if you have opened a BBS file instead of a real mail packet.

Past versions of Q-Blue would warn you if the message you wrote was more than 97 lines long, because of a possibility that such long messages would cause difficulty for network software and be split apart during transmission, or maybe even truncated. Since such length limits are pretty much a thing of the past these days in networks such as FidoNet, in Q-Blue 2.4 that feature has been removed. A few individual BBSes, especially those running outdated software, may still limit the size of messages in some way.

10.4) Selecting an area for the message

When you click the gadget labeled Area: in the message writing window (or press A), a list window opens up, similar to the one that shows all the areas that contain messages you can read. The difference is that this one lists every area known to the BBS (at least usually), even ones with no messages in them. The gadgets in the message creation window will be ghosted while the areas list is open. It opens with the highlight bar on the area that the message is currently in. By selecting a different area with this list window, you can cause the message you are writing to be posted in a different area. This practice is recommended in those common circumstances where a given area is devoted to a particular topic, and your conversation is wandering onto a different subject. If you and the person you are writing to both read some other area where your message fits in better, moving your reply to that other area is a good idea. But note that when the message area is a FidoNet echo or similar large-scale networked conference, moving the message to another area may cause its addressee to fail to ever see it.

When you use the Write new message command and the area you are reading is either the bulletins or your own replies, then this list window will open automatically as soon as the message writing window is open, forcing you to select an area. If you are reading a message in one of the BBS’s regular areas, then the message you write is placed in that area by default. Replies and carbon copies are placed by default in the same area that the message being copied or replied to is in. If the area it would go in is “read only” (meaning that posting messages is not allowed here), the window will open automatically to make you select another area. If you use the Write new email command, it starts out in the Internet email area.

Each area has a number and a name. With a Blue Wave packet, each one may have a number, a short name sometimes called an “echo tag”, and a longer name that gives a more complete description. These are listed in the window in that order from left to right, on each line (see section 7.4). With Blue Wave, it can be the case that the “number” is a short word instead of just digits, but this is rare. At the left edge there may be a letter: “E” means that this is an “echoed” area, shared by more than one BBS. “R” means that this area is “read only”. Q-Blue will show an error message and make you pick another area if you try to put a message in a read only area. “N” means that this is a netmail area (see section 10.6). “U” means that this area is a Usenet newsgroup — a type of area that is only recognized with version 3 Blue Wave mail packets. An “@” sign means that this area is for Internet email. With QWK mail packets, these different types of areas are not distinguished, except for any areas you have marked in the BBS Local setup window’s Mail subwindow as being a netmail or Internet email area.

As with any other list window, you can use the word search function described in sections 9.5 and 9.6 to find an elusive area if there are too many listed to look through. (Some BBSes may have thousands of areas listed here). Type any part of the number, short name, or long name into the search window, and it will reduce the list in the window so it shows only those areas that include the specified word or phrase. Typing U or Alt-U, or reopening the search window and clicking on Nowhere, will restore the full list. So will closing and reopening the window.

Another way to cut the list down to size, if it contains dozens or hundreds of areas you’re not interested in, is to use the gadget labeled Active at the bottom of the screen. It eliminates areas you are not reading from the list. In the case of Blue Wave mail, it includes only those areas which you have selected for reading in the mail door on the BBS, leaving out the ones you never read. In the case of QWK mail, this gadget reduces the list to only those areas which have messages in them in this packet. With QWK it doesn’t know what other areas you might have selected for reading, but received no mail in today. The gadget is ghosted if no areas have messages in them.

When this gadget is used and only active areas are listed, the gadget is changed to read All instead of Active. The keyboard shortcut is A in either case. Clicking All, or pressing A again, restores the full list. It tries to keep the highlight bar on the same area after switching. Searching can be combined with this, and doing a search affects both the complete list and the active areas list, except in one case: when you search the complete list and none of the areas found are present in the active list, selecting Active at that point will display all of the active areas, while the full list displays only those found by the search.

As with other list windows, you make your selection by either double-clicking on the desired line, or moving the highlight bar to the desired place and pressing return or the space bar. Pressing Esc or clicking the close gadget leaves your previous area selection unchanged. Once you make a selection, the number and long name of the newly chosen area will be displayed in the message creation window, to the right of the Area: gadget.

10.5) Adding missing areas to the list

There is one extra feature which is present only with QWK packets. Typically this list window shows every possible area you can write a message in, when Active is not selected, but sometimes this is not true. Some QWK packets do not bother to describe areas other than the ones you have specifically asked to read mail in. Some QWK doors allow this behavior as a configuration choice for each user, since many people have no wish to be burdened with a long list of areas they have no interest in reading.

When this is the case, you have a problem if one day you need to write a message in some other area on the BBS that is not included in the list. So, Q-Blue lets you add new areas to the list. In order to do this, you must know the correct number that the BBS uses for the area you want. If you pick the wrong number, the message may end up in an embarrassingly inappropriate place, or be lost entirely.

If you are certain you know the right number, click the gadget labeled Create at the bottom of the screen while the areas list window is open, or press C. (Note: this gadget was labeled New instead of Create in version 1.0 of Q-Blue.) It will close the window listing the areas and open in its place a small window labeled Describe the message area to add containing string gadgets for the number and name of the area you want. Type the correct number into the first gadget, and a descriptive name in the second. You do not have to use the same name that the BBS uses. Okay and Cancel gadgets complete the window, with the return key being equivalent to Okay. Cancel has the same effect as the close gadget or the Esc key — the new area window will close and the list will window reopen just as it was before. The O and C keys are also shortcuts for the gadgets, as usual.

If you select Okay, it will check to see if the area number is valid. It must have no more than seven digits (the limit was five digits in Q-Blue 2.1 and older), must not be negative, and must not already be in use in the existing list of areas. Q-Blue will give you an error message if the number is not valid, or if you leave the name empty. If everything is valid, it will close this window and reopen the window listing areas, with the highlight bar on your newly created area, at the end of the list. Pressing return will select this as the area the message goes in. When the new area is created, the BBS file in the context directory is rewritten to include the newly created area, so that if you use the Open (no packet) command, you can write messages in that area without having to use the Create option over again. However, this information will be lost again if you download and open a fresh packet from the BBS that does not include that area.

The Create option can be used not only when writing a message, but when selecting a QWK netmail or email area in the BBS Local setup window (see section 6.9), or selecting areas to download future mail from with the Mail door command (sections 11.4 and 11.5).

10.6) Writing netmail messages

Q-Blue includes a feature which allows you to send messages via Netmail: a method by which you can send a private message to a single user on a BBS which is not the one you are uploading your replies to, but is connected to that BBS by a Fido-type network. In such networks, each connected system has an address consisting of up to four numbers in the form “Zone:Net/Node.Point” (example: 1:2345/678.9). Because the QWK packet format has no standard method of handling netmail, special configuration is required to use the netmail feature with QWK packets. This setup procedure is described in section 6.9.

Netmail is handled with two gadgets in the message writing window: a button labeled Netmail with key shortcut N, below the space where the name of the current message area is written, and a string gadget to its right labeled Net address. The string gadget is ghosted except when the current area selected for the message is a netmail area. To put a message into the netmail area, you could click the Area: button and scroll through the list looking for the right one (netmail areas are marked by a letter N in contrasting color at the left edge), or you can just click the Netmail button, which automatically puts the message in a netmail area.

Sometimes there is more than one netmail area, which is often necessary if the BBS is connected to more than one separate network. In this case you’ll have to figure out which netmail area to use to get to the right destination, judging by the names given the different netmail areas, or by instructions provided by your sysop. When there is more than one netmail area, clicking the Netmail gadget repeatedly will cycle through them in turn, eventually bringing you back to the original (non-netmail) area you started in. If there is more than one netmail area and you are in a non-netmail area when you click the button, the first one it jumps to will be the last netmail area you put a message in, or the first one in the areas list if you haven’t written any other netmail yet. If it can’t figure out what non-netmail area a message would be associated with, then it will open the areas list window.

When you put the message in a netmail area, either with the Areas list or the Netmail gadget, the Net address gadget becomes enabled, and if you are writing a reply, Q-Blue tries to fill the gadget with the net address that the message you are replying to originated from. It will typically also set the Privacy cycle gadget to Private, since netmail is usually intended only for one recipient. It will activate this string gadget if it hasn’t got an address in it yet.

The process of figuring out the right address to reply to may not be 100% reliable, and if the address you see there is not where you want to send the message, or if you are writing a message that is not a reply, you have to specify an address. With Blue Wave mail, Q-Blue will flash the screen and activate the address gadget if you try to save a netmail message with no net address, just as if you tried to save a message with no name in the To gadget. But with QWK mail, there are some BBSes which have you put both netmail and local messages in the same area. Because of this, the net address is not mandatory in QWK netmail areas. If you do not enter an address, the message will be posted as local mail instead of as netmail.

The most essential parts of the address are the net number and the node number, which specify what BBS to send the message to. They are decimal numbers from 0 to 65535 separated by a slash, for example “2240/176”. They are usually preceded by a zone number, which may be optional but which, in these days of BBSes often being connected to more than one network at a time, you’d better not leave out. The zone number precedes the net number and is followed by a colon, for example “1:2240/176”. In FidoNet the zone number more or less specifies which continent the BBS is on, where 1 stands for North America, 2 for Europe, and so on; in other cases the number is generally used to indicate which of many smaller networks the destination BBS is to be found in.

The point number is zero when the address is that of a full-fledged BBS or “node”, and in this case it can be left out. When the addressee is a “point” — a private mail system hooked to the network, which can be thought of as a sort of micro-BBS in which the sysop is the only user — then you must specify the point number after the node number with a period in between, for example “1:2345/678.9”. To recap: in this example, 1 is the zone number, 2345 is the net number, 678 is the node number, and 9 is the point number.

In many cases, it is possible to fill in the address in this gadget by copying the right address into the system clipboard and then pressing right-Amiga-V while the gadget is active. Like all string gadgets in Q-Blue’s windows, it uses that keystroke to replace its current contents with the text in the system clipboard. Often you can clip an address from the text of a message onscreen using the mouse (see section 9.2), and paste it into this gadget. This can also be done, of course, with people’s names in the To gadget.

If the address you enter into the string gadget is not a valid specimen of this syntax, Q-Blue will give you an error message. Q-Blue will also reject an address that is the same as that of the BBS you downloaded the mail packet from, except with QWK packets, which leave Q-Blue with no idea what the BBS’s own address is. Local mail areas should be used for such cases.

Once a valid address is there, you can if desired switch the message out of the netmail area by clicking the Netmail button again. It will go back to whatever area it was in before you clicked Netmail the first time, and ghost the address gadget. Or if there is more than one netmail area, clicking Netmail enough times will eventually bring you back to that original area. If you are replying to a netmail message and it doesn’t know of any other non-netmail area to go to, it will just cycle between the different netmail areas.

The rest of the process of writing a netmail message proceeds exactly as usual... with one further possible complication.

10.7) Netmail attribute flags

Each netmail message has certain “attribute” flags, which may give it special properties. Q-Blue may open a small extra window to allow you to choose attributes for this message. Each sysop may or may not allow users to make use of any particular attribute. Quite often, no special attributes at all are allowed; in this case no extra window opens. The window does not open when reading QWK mail, except with a very few mail doors for which Q-Blue knows the right “kluge” to set them. Many of these attributes are not normally used except by sysops. If any are permitted, Q-Blue will open a window containing seven checkmark gadgets. All are initially unchecked, so that no special attributes are set, and those which you cannot alter are ghosted. You may close this window after you have the attribute settings correct, or leave it open until done writing the message, in which case it will close along with the main message writing window. The window will also close if you move the message to a non-netmail area.

Each checkmark gadget has a numeral for a keyboard shortcut, from 1 to 7, which will toggle the attribute on or off. The seven gadgets are:

• #1 is Hold. This attribute causes the netmail message to sit and wait on the BBS until the sysop personally clears it to be sent out on the network, or the receiving system calls and picks it up. Some sysops force all messages to be held this way, to prevent people from sending netmail that ends up costing them too much money on their phone bills.
• #2 is Kill, short for “kill after sending”. This attribute makes the message be automatically deleted after it has been sent out to the other system. If you use this, keep in mind that the reliability of netmail arriving at its destination may be doubtful in some networks.
• #3 is F’Req, which stands for “file request”. With this attribute, the subject line of the message has a special meaning: it is the name of a file or files on the other system. This message will, if all parties involved cooperate, cause the other system to transmit the named file(s) through the network back to your BBS. If you are not the sysop, be sure your sysop is prepared to deal with files arriving that way, and willing to hand the file over to you when it arrives, before using this option.
• #4 is F’Att, which stands for “file attached”. This causes a file on the local BBS to be sent to the other system along with this message. The file must already be on the BBS and ready to send before this option will work, and this option is normally usable only by sysops.
• #5 is Direct. Normally (nowadays) netmail messages are sent from one system to another similarly to the way public echo mail is sent: in hops that may go through half a dozen other systems before reaching the destination. If Direct is specified, the mail processor will attempt to connect straight to the receiving system, eliminating the steps in between, saving time (possibly days), and often causing much higher phone charges. Direct may be useful for making sure that a message really does get through to its destination if that is normally questionable, and you can afford the cost.
• #6 is Crash. Originally this was like Direct except that it not only dials directly to the receiving system, it also (at least typically) does not wait until the phone rates are cheap to do so. If Crash was used during business hours, it could be quite a bit more expensive than Direct. But nowadays the trend is toward treating the Crash flag in a different way, causing the mail to be sent as soon as it is reasonably affordable, e.g. after business hours. And with some mailers, it may not even be sent directly, though the number of intermediate hops should still be minimal.
• #7 is Immediate, which means that the message should be transmitted right away regardless of cost. Some mail software does not recognize this, but when it is recognized, it tells the mailer to drop everything to send this one message right away.

Needless to say, most sysops do not allow their callers to freely use relatively expensive flags like Crash and Immediate. F’Att is rarely used except by sysops, or point system users — ordinary BBS callers usually would not be able to manage this at all except in close cooperation with the sysop. F’Req is also usually restricted, since if a large file is transferred this can be even more expensive than crash messages.

If you have closed this window and wish to reopen it, you can do so by moving the message to a non-netmail area and then back into netmail. You can do this either by selecting from the areas list window or clicking the netmail button. Two clicks will do it if there is only one netmail area.

10.8) Writing Internet messages

To write an Internet email message, you use the gadget labeled @-email, just to the left of the Netmail button. Its keyboard shortcut is the “@” sign (you have to hold the shift key down). It is similar to sending Fido netmail in many ways, but there are some significant differences. One is that you can move a message into netmail just by selecting a netmail area in the list window by clicking the Area: button, but the email features are not activated by just putting the message in the right area; you must use the @-email gadget. Another difference is that more than one Fido-type netmail area may exist, but Q-Blue assumes there is only a single Internet email area. If a BBS does not have an email area set up, the @-email gadget is ghosted. The Write new email menu command, as mentioned above, is a shortcut for opening the window and then clicking this gadget.

Version 3 Blue Wave mail has direct support for Internet email, allowing destination addresses up to 99 characters long. But most BBSes do not have this direct support set up. With QWK mail or version 2 Blue Wave mail, and possibly even some version 3 Blue Wave BBSes, a “kluge” must be used to tell the system what address the email is to be sent to. Q-Blue will automatically use the correct kluge if you put the correct settings for the BBS into the BBS Local setup window’s Mail sub-window, which is explained in section 6.10. The most common kluge method allows addresses up to 75 characters long. The method used by Searchlight BBS is limited to 66 characters, and some PCBoard BBSes may support 120 character addresses. If one of these two proprietary methods needs to be used, the BBS Local setup must be configured accordingly.

When the @-email gadget is used, the caption of the message composing window has “[Internet]” appended to it. Unless the To: string gadget already contains a valid internet address (which generally consists of a series of words separated by periods with an at-sign somewhere in the middle, and no spaces), then the name there is removed. If you are replying to a message that has an originating email address in its header (the lines shown in cyan color at the top of the message body), then that address will be inserted into the To: string. If there is a subject line in the message’s header, the contents of the Subj.: gadget may also be changed. If you are replying to a message in the email area with a valid originating address, your reply is email by default without having to click @-email.

One way that email is often sent is through a FidoNet “gateway”. In this case, the message is actually sent as netmail to a machine on FidoNet which translates it into email form. The BBS Local setup window allows you to specify the FidoNet address of the gateway. When email is configured this way, using the @-email gadget causes the netmail address string gadget to be enabled, and the gate address specified in the BBS Local setup is copied into it. The netmail attributes window may also open. Since this is both a netmail message and an Internet message, you can set the various netmail options, including a different gate address, though the To: gadget still holds an Internet address. If the gateway address field in the BBS Local setup window is blank, you must manually supply the Fido address each time you send email. This applies only to Blue Wave mail; with QWK, the BBS Local gateway address field must contain an address or Q-Blue will assume that email is not gated.

Clicking on @-email again turns the message back into non-email form. The To: gadget gets its previous contents restored, and so does the netmail address gadget, if it was in use.

With version 3 Blue Wave mail packets, some areas are marked as Usenet newsgroups. As of this writing, many BBSes have newsgroup areas, but are not able to distinguish them from other kinds of areas. Q-Blue treats these mostly like Fido-style echo areas, except that if you make an Internet email reply, it will scan the message for appropriate header lines as if it were an Internet message. True newsgroup areas differ from other areas in two ways: messages are not addressed to any individual recipient — in effect, every message is to All — and it is possible for a single message to be present in more than one newsgroup at a time. Q-Blue has support for posting to multiple newsgroups which is rudimentary but usable: the To: string contains a list of the newsgroups that the message is to be posted in, separated by commas. The gadget is labeled NGrps: instead of To: in this case. This list of names can be up to 400 characters long. If the message being replied to specifies a set of newsgroups, Q-Blue will copy the list into this gadget, unless it’s too long. In an effort to reduce “spamming” (the annoying practice of posting a message to far more newsgroups than it belongs in), Q-Blue will ignore entirely any newsgroup list over 400 characters. If the gadget is empty, the message will be posted into the single newsgroup area that is shown next to the Area: gadget.

10.9) Taglines

Over the last decade, a custom has grown up among many people who post messages on BBS systems. The custom is to add a little extra one-line joke or saying to the end of each message. These little additions are called “taglines”.

Q-Blue’s tagline feature is usually accessed from the message writing window. There is a command button labeled Tagline at the bottom, between the Edit and Cancel gadgets. Clicking it or pressing T causes the taglines window to open. It is also possible to cause this window to open automatically, with settings in the Replying setup window, as described in section 6.7. The first time you open it, Q-Blue will load your taglines file. The window can also be opened with the Maintain taglines menu command, which also uses T as its key shortcut, when you are not writing a message.

The pathname of the file it automatically loads is specified in a string gadget in the Replying setup window, or can be overridden for a single BBS with an equivalent string gadget in the BBS Local setup window. If none is specified or it cannot be read, then the ASL file requester opens so you can select a file to load. The file you select is a plain text file, with one tagline on each line. It may also contain blank lines, and comment lines which begin with a “;” (semicolon) character. An example file called Taglines is included with Q-Blue. It contains several hundred taglines. Some people collect thousands. The window can list up to 32000 taglines, but watch out if your tagline file grows very large, because Q-Blue holds the entire file in memory. If you have thousands of taglines, it may be best to divide them into several files. The next time you use the window it opens instantly.

The taglines window is simply a scrolling list window with one valid tagline on each line. Blank lines, comment lines (starting with a semicolon), and lines that are too long to use, are not shown in the list. The current selection (the highlighted line) is set randomly when the window opens, except when the Default tagline setting is Sequence, in which case it shows the tagline after the one last used. There is a string gadget at the bottom of the window, which holds a copy of the currently selected line. It is automatically updated as you select different lines.

When the default tagline setting is Sequence, each time a tagline is used, Q-Blue will set the filenote of the currently loaded tagline file to a number indicating which one was last used. This way, it knows where to resume the sequence when you run it again. If you manually select a different tagline for any message, the sequence will then continue from that point. There is an exception: if you write a new tagline in the string gadget, or the tagline you pick is any that was added to the end of the list after the file was loaded, the sequence position will be left unchanged. The number saved in the filenote may be slightly inaccurate if you delete taglines from the list, though often it can compensate. If you load from one file and then save the list to a different file, the second gets filenoted from then on.

You can edit that string gadget to create a new tagline. When you press return on a new or modified line in the string gadget, it is added to the list in the window at the end, becoming the new current selection. If the new line is partly the same as the original that you edited, a requester asks you if you want to delete the old version. Note that if you have used a search on the tagline window, creating a new tagline with the string gadget will force the window to be restored to its unsearched condition, unless the line you enter matches one already displayed. Unfortunately, it is not possible at present to insert new taglines into the middle of the list; they always appear at the end. Any major editing of the tagline file is best done with a text editor.

Once you select a tagline for a message you are writing, it will be visible at the bottom of that message after it has been saved. But when you edit the message, the tagline will not appear in the text being edited. In this it differs from the Signature text that you can specify in the Replying setup window, which does get loaded into the editor as part of your message.

If you are reading a Blue Wave packet, certain message areas may forbid taglines. When you post a message in such an area, Q-Blue will not allow a tagline to be added, and if you move a message with a tagline into such an area, it will be removed. As of this writing, most BBSes do not have any areas that forbid tagines.

Any time a tagline file is unloaded, either when it’s time to load a different one or when you exit Q-Blue, you may be prompted with a reminder that any changes to your current tagline list have not been saved. This will happen if you delete any taglines, or add any new ones other than lines that you type in just to attach to the current reply. The requester has the options Save, which brings up an ASL requester to select where to save them; Discard, which ignores the changes; and Cancel, which aborts whatever action would have unloaded the old tagline file. Remember: if you add a tagline for use on the current message you are writing, Q-Blue will not remind you to save the tagline list (unless there are other changes also), so if you want such a tagline to be a permanent addition, save it manually (see next section).

10.10) Tagline window options

There are six gadget options at the bottom of the screen when the tagline list window is open. Besides the Search option that is available in every list window, the options are Delete, Random, None, Load, and saVe.

Delete removes the currently selected tagline from the list, after asking you with a requester if you’re sure. Either the Del key or the letter D works as a shortcut for it. Random tells it to arbitrarily select a different line. Use this when you don’t like the one selected but don’t have a strong preference for another line to use. The selection is not quite random: it avoids reselecting lines you have already seen (except when the list is reduced by a word search). Use Search if you want to locate a particular line, or lines containing particular words — this makes it easy to find those relevant to a particular topic. Sections 9.5 and 9.6 describe how to use the search window.

None tells it that this message should have no tagline. It closes the window, and erases any tagline the message already had. This is different from simply canceling the window with the close gadget or Esc key, which leaves intact any previously selected tagline. Another way to leave your message with no tagline is to activate the string gadget, erase its contents, and then press return.

Load brings up the ASL file requester so you can select a new tagline file. Your selection is copied into the File containing taglines string gadget in the BBS Local setup window (unless you just reload the same file already loaded), so if you use that window’s Save gadget, the new choice becomes permanent for this BBS. The global default setting is not changed. This means that when you close the packet and open another one, Q-Blue will revert to using the original default tagline file (if any); the new selection you’ve made only lasts until the packet is closed.

The saVe gadget differs from most other Q-Blue command buttons in that its key shortcut is not its first letter. The shortcut is V, because S is used for search. It brings up the ASL file requester and lets you save a copy of the taglines file. Any new taglines that you have added to the end of it are included, and any that you deleted will be left out. All comments and other lines not shown in the taglines window will be preserved when the new taglines file is written out. The default place to save it is into the same file it was loaded from. Just as with the Load option, if you specify a new filename it will be copied into the BBS Local setup window’s File containing taglines gadget.

Offline readers with fancy tagline support generally include a feature for “stealing” taglines from messages you are reading. Q-Blue does not have a function specifically for this purpose, but it has something almost as good: you can paste any text from the system clipboard into the tagline window. That window’s string gadget, like all string gadgets in Q-Blue (see section 1.3) responds to the keystroke right-Amiga-V by replacing its contents with whatever text is in the clipboard, if there is any. And when the tagline window is open, this works even when the string gadget is not active: a press of right-Amiga-V activates the gadget and pastes from the clipboard into it. Combined with the ability to clip text from messages with the mouse (described in section 9.2), this makes tagline stealing fairly easy. Just drag the mouse over the tagline you want to steal (even if it’s a phrase in the middle of a message instead of an actual tagline), open the taglines window (use the Maintain taglines command if you are not currently writing a message), and press right-Amiga-V. You can then edit the result in the window’s string gadget if desired.

10.11) Attached files

On some BBSes, occasionally you may receive a message (usually private) with a file “attached” to it. This is indicated in Q-Blue by a highlighted line at the top of the message text that gives the name of the file, like this:

* Attached file: something.zip  (use Alt-T to save)

When you get a message with such a notation on it, the file named in this line is included in your mail packet, and you can save a permanent copy of it using the Alt-T command, as described in section 9.4. When you write a reply or a new message, you can also add an attached file of your own, which someone who reads your message can save a copy of. This is done with the FAttach button in the message writing window.

Many BBSes do not support attaching files to messages. Of those that do, many restrict which areas it is allowed in. Private mail is the most common place where file attachment is allowed. Most Blue Wave doors do not include any support for file attachment, and in these cases the FAttach button will be ghosted and the feature will be unavailable. In the rather unlikely event that you find a Blue Wave door that does support it, the FAttach button will be available whenever you select a message area that allows attachments. With QWK packets, the button is always available, but if the BBS does not support attachments or does not allow them in the area where your message is posted, whatever file you include in your upload will be ignored.

Using the FAttach button (key shortcut F) opens a window with several gadgets for specifying the attachment. First is a button labeled File: next to a string gadget. This is where you select which file to attach. You can type the pathname into the string gadget, or press the File: button to bring up an ASL file requester. If the message has no attachment yet, the ASL requester opens automatically when this window opens.

Below these is a second, shorter, string gadget labeled Name to send as:. This specifies what name the file should appear to have when the recipient sees it. It may be completely different from the original name it has on your computer. By default, the name is taken from the file you select; whenever you change the file that is selected in the upper string gadget, the lower one is updated with the equivalent name. You can leave this name in place, or modify it.

In most cases, the name that the file is sent as must adhere to MS-DOS filename restrictions: no more than eight characters, a dot, and a three character extension. If you select a file with a name that doesn’t fit this restriction, Q-Blue will truncate it to fit this format when it turns the local pathname above into the “equivalent” name below. It will also reject characters that MS-DOS doesn’t accept in filenames, such as spaces, quote marks, square brackets, and so on.

At the bottom of the window is a checkmark gadget labeled Allow names exceeding MS-DOS 8.3 limits. When this is checked, Q-Blue will not truncate long names to 8.3 format, or filter out quotes and square brackets. It will still object to characters such as spaces or backslashes, which may confuse the receiving system even if it is not as limited as most BBSes. This checkmark is ghosted when you are writing Blue Wave replies; MS-DOS restrictions are always enforced in this case. And take note: because Blue Wave support is so scanty in this area, the use of attached files in Blue Wave is an almost completely untested feature of Q-Blue.

There are two buttons at the lower right of this window: one labeled Clear, and one labeled Okay. Clear empties both of the string gadgets. Clicking Okay or pressing return closes the window. The attachment is added to the reply when you click Save in the message writing window. If you clear the string gadgets and then press Okay, any existing attachment the message had will be removed.

There may be an error message when you select Okay. This can happen if the Name to send as gadget is empty or in some way invalid, or if the file you selected can’t be found.

If you reload a reply packet that includes attached files, and re-edit a message with an attachment, Q-Blue does not know what file you got the attachment from. In this case, the upper string gadget and the File: button are ghosted. If you change the Name to send as gadget, Q-Blue keeps the same file attached but changes its name. To remove it and attach a different file instead, use the Clear button. This un-ghosts the upper gadgets and lets you select a new file (or leave the message with no attachment).

If you move a message with an attachment to another area, and the other area does not support attachments, Q-Blue will put up a requester asking whether you want to cancel the move, pick a different area, or try leaving the message in the new area even though the BBS is expected to reject the attachment.

If you delete a message with an attachment, the attached file is not deleted. You can undelete the message and the attachment will still be there. However, the attached file will be left out of the upload archive when you use the Pack replies command. (Q-Blue temporarily hides these attachments of deleted messages in the parent of the replies directory before running the compressor program.) Like the deleted message itself, it is not lost until you close the mail packet.

11) COMPLETING THE UPLOAD PACKET

11.1) File download requests

Replies are not the only thing that Q-Blue lets you create in response to a mail packet. With at least some types of mail bundling software, you can also include other material in the upload packet. Q-Blue lets you specify extra information that instructs the mail door to, for instance, change the list of areas that it should download mail from.

BBSes don’t just offer messages to read, of course. They also offer files you can download. And many BBSes provide a service of including, in your mail packets, a list of all new files that have become available for download since the previous packet. With some BBSes, Q-Blue lets you include in your reply upload a list of which files you want to download, so you don’t have to note down the names and remember later, while calling the BBS, to go to the files section and get them.

The Request D/L option (keyboard shortcut Alt-R) allows you to specify up to ten files that you want to download. This is useful if you are reading a list of new files, or if a message you read mentions the name of a file you want to have a copy of. When you use this feature, the mail door will prompt you to receive these files immediately after you upload your replies, so you don’t have to go to the BBS’s file area and tell it the names of the files manually. At present Q-Blue only supports this for Blue Wave mail, because QWK methods for doing this are inconsistent at best, and in most cases nonexistent.

When Request D/L is selected, a small window titled File download requests will open, containing ten short string gadgets. Simply type the names of the desired files into these string gadgets and close the window. A small extra file will be written into your replies directory, which will be included in the packet you upload to the BBS. In a few cases, some of the ten gadgets may be ghosted; this means that the sysop of the BBS has set a limit lower than ten on the number of files you can request for download. These filenames are limited to 12 characters, because the current Blue Wave format unfortunately assumes that only MS-DOS compatible filenames are used. If the BBS supports longer filenames, you’ll just have to download such files manually for the time being.

When you are done, just close the window. There is no Cancel option — if you wish to undo something you have to erase or edit the string gadget manually. As with other Q-Blue string gadgets, you can paste from the clipboard into a gadget by pressing right-Amiga-V while it is active. This can be useful if a bulletin listing newly downloadable files is on the screen; use the mouse to drag-select the name of a file, and paste it into a string gadget in the File download requests window.

Naturally, the possibility exists that the BBS may fail to send you the files. This might happen if, for instance, the BBS insists that you have to upload some files first in order to gain downloading privileges.

11.2) Blue Wave mail door option flags

The Blue Wave mail format allows you to control most of the options of the mail door while you are reading messages in Q-Blue. This is done with the Mail door option in the Replies menu, or with the key shortcut Alt-M. This command opens a window titled Blue Wave mail door configuration, which in turn allows you to open two more windows controlling further aspects of the mail door’s behavior, one of which is used for selecting which message areas you want to read.

When the Mail door option is used while reading a QWK mail packet, it opens that area selection window only, because the only mail door configuration option that Q-Blue supports with QWK mail is the ability to add and drop message areas. See sections 11.4 and 11.5 for a description of how to use that window.

The Blue Wave format’s method of adjusting mail door settings offline has changed with recent mail door releases. Some configuration options will only be available with version 3 Blue Wave packets. With older version 2 mail packets, there are four checkmark gadgets at the top of the window, four string gadgets, one cycle gadget, and three command buttons. With a version 3 mail packet, there are five additional checkmarks, one numeric string gadget, and one additional cycle gadget.

The checkmark gadgets at the top of the window each control a door option that can be turned on or off. They are:

• Hotkey menu commands, keyboard shortcut H. When this is checked, the mail door will respond immediately to any command letter you type into it. When it’s not checked, you have to press return for a command to be executed.
• Expert (brief) menus, keyboard shortcut E. When checked, the command menus displayed by the door consist of a simple one-line list of which letters it recognizes. Otherwise it displays a menu screen with a short summary of each command.
• Color graphics in menus, keyboard shortcut C. When checked, the door will use ANSI sequences in the text it displays in order to create multicolored pictures on your terminal’s display, if your terminal knows how to display ANSI color. Turning this off causes its output to be monochromatic, containing no ANSI sequences. In theory it’s also supposed to make it use only basic ASCII characters with no special IBM characters, but often the doors use these characters anyway.
• Include my replies, keyboard shortcut I. When checked, any replies you upload from Q-Blue will be included with the new messages next time you download more mail. Otherwise, your replies will be left out.
• Filter out Fido control lines, keyboard shortcut F. This one is present with version 3 only. If unchecked, the door will include special kluge lines used by Fido-compatible networks in each echomail message. Each such line is preceded by a Ctrl-A character (which might display as a small smiley-face when using an IBM font), and shows as purple when displayed by Q-Blue. Some mail doors ignore your preferred setting of this option. And the “MSGID:” kluge line generally will not be filtered out even if it is checked.
• Numeric file extensions, keyboard shortcut N. This is also present with version 3 only. Normally, Blue Wave mail doors create packets with names like WHATEVER.MO1, in which the extension is based on the day of the week. If this is checked, the packets will have extensions consisting of digits only, such as WHATEVER.047.

Each of these checkmark options, like all of the other gadgets, is originally set to display how the mail door was configured at the time of the mail download. Or, if you had previously changed some of the settings, and then reopened the same mail packet and reloaded the unfinished replies, the changes you made then will be displayed when the window is opened. With version 3 mail packets, the changes are stored in a file with the extension “.OLC” in your replies directory, which gets included in your upload packet. With version 2 packets, a file with the extension “.PDQ” is used.

11.3) More Blue Wave mail door configuration choices

With version 3 packets, immediately below the six checkmarks are a numeric string gadget labeled Max pkt size (K) and a cycle gadget labeled List of new files. The former tells the mail door that it should not create mail packets larger than a given size, for instance 200K bytes if you put “200” into this gadget. If the gadget is left blank or contains “0”, there is no limit. Some Blue Wave doors will ignore this setting, and may even display random incorrect values in it. If this happens, there is nothing to do but ignore it.

The List of new files cycle gadget has three choices: None, Text, and ANSI. The latter two indicate that each mail packet should include a list of new files available for download on the BBS. Select None if you don’t want such a list. If ANSI is selected, the list will be written with ANSI color codes in the text. Since the colors do not show in current versions of Q-Blue, you might as well just select Text.

Below these two, or below the first four checkmark gadgets with a version 2 packet, are a string gadget and a cycle gadget. They are used to control the Blue Wave password security feature. If you desire, the Blue Wave door can demand that you give a password before it lets you download mail, or it can make Q-Blue demand the password before you can open the packet, or both. The string gadget labeled Password contains the word that you will need to type in when it asks. The cycle gadget labeled When tells when you will be asked. If it says Never, the password is ignored. If it says Door, the mail door will require the password before letting you download your next batch of mail. Reader means that Q-Blue will ask for the password when you open the packet. Both means you will be asked at both of those times. The key shortcut for cycling this gadget is W. Both of these gadgets are set to display the password options, if any, that the door is currently using. If you change them, then after you upload replies the door will use the new settings.

Below the password string gadget are three string gadgets labeled Macro #1, Macro #2, and Macro #3. These gadgets are used to contain sequences of Blue Wave “bundling commands”. These are the cryptic commands that you can type into a Blue Wave door after it shows you what messages can be downloaded in what areas. The macros can be used to store a complex sequence that you use often.

With version 3 mail packets, each macro string gadget has a checkmark to its right. They are labeled “#1 auto”, “#2 auto”, and “#3 auto”, and their keyboard shortcuts are 1, 2, and 3. If any of these is checked, the macro string to its left will be automatically executed whenever a mail packet is prepared for you.

The uppermost of the three command buttons in the lower right corner of the window is labeled Key/Fil, shortcut K. It opens a second window labeled Keywords and filters used by Blue Wave mail door, which can be used simultaneously with the main mail door window. Using the gadget again, or closing the main window, will close that window too. It contains twenty string gadgets, in two groups of ten. On the left is a group labeled Keywords to look for: and on the right are ten labeled Filter words to avoid:. When the Blue Wave door searches for new messages to download, it checks the From, To, and Subject heading lines of each message to see if any of the keywords or filter words can be found in them. The “K” bundling command can be used to tell the door that in one area, or all areas, only messages that contain keywords (plus messages addressed to you) should be downloaded. The “F” bundling command tells it to download only messages that do not contain any of the filter words. You can set any of these gadgets to contain the words, names, or short phrases that the door should check for.

The middle command button is Areas, shortcut A. It opens the window that lets you select message areas to download, which is described in sections 11.4 and 11.5. The gadgets in the main mail door window, and the keywords and filters window if it is open, will be ghosted while the area selection window is open. If you click the close gadget of the main mail door window, the area selection window will also close, as will the keyword window.

The final button is Reset, shortcut R. This lets you undo any changes you have made to the door’s option settings, or keywords and filters. It does not affect changes made in the areas selection window — that has its own separate Reset option. If any changes have been made, it will put up a requester asking if you are sure you want to undo changes, with Yes and Cancel options. If you select Yes, then all of the settings in this window, and the keywords and filters, will be changed back to the settings that the mail door is already using. If you use Reset and there are no areas marked with changes such as Add or Drop in the area selection window, the “.OLC” or “.PDQ” file in the replies directory will be deleted. If there are no changes to undo, the gadget is ghosted.

11.4) Mail door message area selection

Sometimes, when you are reading mail, you decide that some message area is boring and you don’t want the mail door to download its messages to you any more. Or you see an area that intrigues you, and you want to tell the mail door to send you the messages in it. The window for controlling this function in Q-Blue works somewhat differently for QWK mail and Blue Wave mail. When reading a QWK mail packet, this window is accessed by using the Mail door option of the Replies menu, shortcut Alt-M. With Blue Wave mail, the Mail door option opens a window which contains an Areas button gadget, which in turn opens this window when clicked. The window is titled Select areas to add or drop from downloads, and in form it is very much like the list window used to select what area to put a reply you are writing into (see section 10.4), but its usage is different, with some unique quirks.

The areas available are listed in a scrollable window like others in Q-Blue, one on each line. Each area’s number and name(s) are shown, and there may be characters indicating which areas are read only, netmail, or echoed, exactly as in the window for selecting an area for a message you write. The one addition is a column along the left edge, labeled Read? at the top. It shows Yes for each area the door is currently set to download messages from, and no for each area the door is ignoring... except with QWK mail, where any area that does not have messages in it in this packet is labeled “?” because Q-Blue does not know whether you are downloading it or not. With version 3 Blue Wave mail, it may also say Pers or PAll if you have set the area to download only personal mail, or only personal messages plus those addressed to All. Any changed settings you specify will be shown in bright colors — white on red in the default eight color palette. See section 7.1 for general instructions on using scrolling list windows.

Any changes you specify take effect once you upload your replies to the mail door. In the case of QWK mail, it works by writing empty messages addressed to a special name used by the mail door. A file in the download packet named DOOR.ID tells it what name to use. If that file is not present, a requester will warn you that the feature may not work. In some cases it works even when DOOR.ID is not present... and occasionally, it fails even if one is present. For instance, the built-in QWK feature in Maximus BBS software makes the mistake of including a DOOR.ID even though the feature of adding and dropping areas is actually not supported at all. When no DOOR.ID file is present, any ADD or DROP messages you create will be addressed to “QMAIL”, a name many (but not all) mail doors will respond to.

With Blue Wave mail, a special file with the BBS’s packet name followed by the extension “.OLC” or “.PDQ” is created, which specifies both the door options (see section 11.2 and 11.3) and, if any areas were added or dropped, the complete list of which areas should be downloaded. This means that if you download a packet and then change some of the door’s settings while still online, and then upload replies containing a “.PDQ” file, the changes you made online will be forgotten, replaced entirely by those specified in Q-Blue.

To drop a message area, you simply click the gadget labeled Drop or press D. This gadget can also be used to cancel any add or drop setting you have previously marked an area with. Adding a message area is more complex, because there are further options available with many mail doors. The gadget labeled Add..., key shortcut A, may open a small requester window with further options. With version 2 Blue Wave mail, it simply marks the area as added. With version 3 Blue Wave mail, it opens a small window containing three “radio buttons”, each representing one possible way to read messages in the area. The three choices are All messages, Only personal msgs, and Personal + to All. The key shortcuts are A, O, and P. The first button, which is activated by default, causes all new messages in the area to be downloaded with each packet. The second causes all messages not addressed to you personally to be ignored. The third includes those personal messages, plus messages addressed to All. The area will then be marked Add or Pers or PAll in the list window. No method is provided for specifying how many old messages to download in the new area; you have to use “bundling commands” at download time if you want to control this.

With QWK mail, the little requester is completely different. It includes two checkmarks and a string gadget. The first checkmark is labeled ADD: read this area and the second, which may be disabled with some mail doors, is labeled RESET: ignore old msgs. Their key shortcuts are A and R. By default, the first is checked. It indicates that an ADD command should be sent to the mail door, telling it to start downloading mail from this area. The second indicates that a RESET command should be sent, telling it to download new mail only; otherwise the default is usually to download every available old message. Both commands can be sent together by checking both. The string gadget allows extra text to be added to these commands. Different QWK mail doors vary in what syntax they support for extra information, if any. Consult the documentation of the QWK door you are using. In the simplest case, when you just want to start reading an area, you probably just want to set both checkmarks and leave the string blank, but if your door supports fancier commands, you can make use of them.

Some mail doors support commands to tell it how many old messages to download, with a syntax such as “RESET HIGH-20” or “ADD -50”. By typing the extra information into the string gadget, it can be appended to whichever command you issue. If both ADD and RESET are checked, the extra text will be appended to the RESET command. For example, the first example might be accomplished by checking RESET and entering “HIGH-20” in the string gadget. ADD would be checked if this is an area you have not previously been reading; if you just want to “rewind” an area you are already reading, it should be unchecked. The second example would be accomplished by checking ADD but not RESET, and putting “-50” in the string gadget. Some doors allow you to specify that only personal messages should be downloaded; the most common way to do this is to check the ADD box and put “YOURS” in the string gadget. Do not check RESET, as a rule; “RESET YOURS” won’t work. Some doors also support downloading personal mail plus mail to “All”; putting “YA” instead of “YOURS” in the string gadget is the most common form that is supported for this purpose.

If you check neither the ADD nor the RESET gadget, the string gadget can be used to specify a command having nothing to do with either of these. For instance, some mail doors use a command such as “YOUR” or “ADDY” instead of “ADD YOURS” to specify that personal mail only should be downloaded; in this case you should put the required word in the string gadget and leave both the ADD and RESET gadgets unchecked. If you leave both unchecked, the area will be marked misc instead of Add in the areas list. If you check the RESET gadget, the area will be market Rset, or AddR if ADD is also checked.

Q-Blue does not support issuing more than one command per message area, except in the single case of combining ADD and RESET, with extra arguments on the latter. But it is possible to do QWK configuration “by hand”, by writing a message that is addressed to the name of the mail door. Consult the documentation of the particular mail door you are using for how to do this, and what options are accepted. Q-Blue’s BBS Information requester (section 9.3) displays the mail door name that such control messages should be addressed to, if a DOOR.ID file was present. This name is what you put into the To field of your control messages. When you combine handmade control messages with adding and dropping done with the list window, the manually created messages will be processed by the mail door after the automatic ones, so they have the final say.

11.5) Extra options available when selecting mail areas

A Search gadget, shortcut S, is available as it is with any other list window. It works the same as elsewhere, temporarily removing from the list all areas that do not contain a given word or phrase somewhere in their descriptions (names or number). See section 9.5 for details on word searches. Pressing U, or opening the search window again and selecting Nowhere, restores the full list as it was before searching.

A gadget labeled Create, shortcut C, is also present in the case of QWK mail. This works identically to the Create gadget available when selecting an area for a reply to be placed in: it adds a new area to the list. Complete details are in section 10.5, but briefly, it opens a small window which lets you enter the number of an area not included in the list, and a descriptive name for it. The name can be anything you wish, but the number must match an area number used by the mail door, to do any good. This is often useful for cases in which the list of areas included with the mail packet leaves out those you aren’t downloading. To add such an area, you must know the right number for it, and enter that number in the small window that opens when you give the Create command, along with some name. When you select Okay, the list of areas will reopen, with the new area highlighted at the end. You can then use Add to cause the mail door to begin downloading that area, if you used the correct number. The new area will also appear in the reply area selection list.

Another command button at the bottom of the screen is labeled Reset, with R as its keyboard shortcut. With this, you can undo all of the notations such as Add, Drop, Rset, Pers, and so on that you have put on various areas. It will put up a requester asking you if you’re sure you want to cancel all changes before it does so. Answer Yes to go ahead and remove all of the changes, or Cancel to leave them as they are. The gadget is ghosted if there are no Add or Drop settings to undo. Note that this Reset option has nothing to do with the option to send a “RESET” control message to the mail door; that is controlled from the small requester window that is opened with the “Add...” gadget.

Since this list window is concerned only with changing the status of the separate areas listed, and it does not matter what line the highlight bar is on when you close the window, and it makes no difference whether you close the window with the return key or the Esc key or the closebox. Normally the latter two would cancel any selection you made; in this case they simply close the window. Also, double-clicking on a line normally closes the window, but in this case double-clicks are ignored and have no effect.

11.6) Packing your replies for uploading

The Pack replies item (shortcut P) tells Q-Blue to compress the replies you have written into an upload packet, along with any download requests or mail door configuration changes you have made. It is ghosted if you haven’t written any replies or other upload material, or have made no changes since the last time you packed them. When the Pack replies menu item is enabled, the button gadget at the lower left corner of the screen is labeled Pack and performs the same function. It is labeled Close otherwise, corresponding to the Close packet menu item. Note: if replies were reloaded directly from the replies directory without decompressing an upload packet, it assumes that packing is needed and the gadget starts out as Pack instead of Close. Packing may not actually be needed, if you had already packed them when the packet was last open.

The packing operation is basically similar to the unpacking described in section 8.3. First, any file in the uploads directory that has the same name as the archive it is trying to produce is moved out of the way (see the next paragraph), then a console window is opened and the compression command is executed in it. Q-Blue will keep the window open until you press return, if it senses any apparent errors. If the compression fails, it’s up to you to correct the problem and try again. If the expected archive file does not exist or is empty after the command is run, it will tell you so with an error requester.

When Q-Blue uses a compression command to make an archive, it first checks whether any file already exists with the name of the archive to be created. If so, and it’s non-empty, it renames the old one before creating the new one. The new name is formed by appending “.old” to the name being created — e.g. an existing file WHATEVER.REP will be renamed as WHATEVER.REP.old before it creates the new file. If WHATEVER.REP.old already exists when the renaming is attempted, it will be deleted. This means you will always have a backup copy of your previous reply packet when you pack your current replies. It will do this backup operation only once while a given packet is open, so that if you use the Pack command several times, it will replace the new archive without disturbing the backup copy. This way, a copy of whatever upload archive you had before opening this packet is preserved, in case (for instance) it turns out that you thought those replies had been uploaded, but actually they had not been. If the rename operation fails, it reports that and gives you an option to just delete the existing packet instead of keeping it as a backup.

Once the replies are packed into an archive in your uploads directory, you then have to upload that file to the same mail door that you downloaded the original mail from. The mail door will then post your replies into the correct message areas so that the people they are addressed to can read them, and process any download requests or configuration changes you’ve included. You may do this the next time you call the BBS to download mail, or call it back immediately just to do the upload, if you want people to see your replies as soon as possible.

11.7) Closing the mail packet; exiting the program

After you have packed your replies and are done reading the mail, you may want to close the mail packet, so you can open another one. To do this, use the Close packet item in the Packet menu, or you can use the button gadget in the lower left corner, which if you have no changed reply material needing to be packed, is labeled Close instead of Pack. The keyboard shortcut is C.

If you close a packet while there are replies not packed yet, it will put up a requester asking whether they should be packed or not, with gadgets labeled Pack, Ignore, and Cancel. The default is to pack them. Ignore tells it to close the packet without packing the replies, and Cancel tells it not to close the packet after all. Note that if you pack them this way instead of giving a pack command manually, it may not give you a second chance if something goes wrong; it will go ahead and close the packet and discard all of your replies from its internal memory unless some obvious error takes place in the packing — for instance, if the archive file it’s trying to create does not appear at all. If Q-Blue fails to notice a problem, it is possible to salvage the replies from your replies directory by archiving them by hand from a CLI... unless you have the Empty reply dir at close option activated, in which case there may be nothing you can do.

If the Option to delete packet gadget in the Options setup window is checked, it will then put up a requester asking whether you want to delete the mail packet that you just read. It will give the full pathname of the packet you opened, and tell you how many messages in it, out of how many total, have not been read. (Messages excluded by a twit list are not counted in the total that can be read.) The default is No, of course. The requester will not appear if the packet file does not have the same size or datestamp that it had when you opened it; this is to protect against accidentally deleting a newer packet from the same BBS. And of course, the requester does not come up if you opened a BBS file with the Open (no packet) command, or if you opened mail that was already in the work directory, which Q-Blue did not unpack. If you choose Yes, the packet is deleted, and if it has a Workbench icon that is deleted also.

If the packet is not deleted, then Q-Blue will attach a filenote to it indicating how many of the messages have been read, as a percentage of the total. Such a filenote simply reads, for example, “23% read.” Under some conditions it will not add such a filenote: if the archive file is not the same size it was when you opened it (which will be the case if you download a new packet from the BBS with the same name), if it already has a filenote that was not written by Q-Blue, or if it has a Q-Blue filenote which gives a percentage larger than what would be written. These filenotes are displayed in the files list window when you give the Open command, so you can see which packets have been partially or completely read already.

The actual operation of closing the packet consists of deleting the files in the work directory, forgetting all of the messages in its memory, and returning the screen and gadgets and menus to the empty state they were in when you first started it up. Files in the replies directory are deleted if you have the Empty reply dir at close option set (section 6.3), but not if the replies have not been successfully packed.

Q-Blue puts up the “busy” mouse pointer and ignores input for a few moments until this whole process is finished. The gadgets at the bottom of the screen become Open, No pkt., Iconify, and Quit, and the others are ghosted.

If you use the Quit option while a packet is open (keyboard shortcut Q), it will put up a requester asking you whether you want to keep the packet’s files in your work directory after quitting. You can select Empty to have it delete the work files as is done whenever you close a packet, or Leave to have the work directory left intact. If you choose Leave, then the next time you run Q-Blue and select Open, it will allow you to reload the mail in the work directory without having to decompress the packet it came from. (Very few other offline readers let you do this.) The default option in this requester is Cancel, which tells it not to quit at all. Before asking this, if you have replies that have not been packed, it will ask you whether you want to pack the replies (the default) or ignore them. They will be left intact in your replies directory, where they can be reloaded if the next packet you open is from the same BBS, unless you have Empty reply dir at close set and you are emptying the work directory. The Leave option causes Empty reply dir at close to be ignored.

If you choose to empty the work directory rather than leaving files intact in it, and the Option to delete packet feature is activated in the Options setup window, then it will ask whether you want to delete the mail packet, just as it does with the Close packet command.

If you select Quit when no packet is open (for instance, by using Close and Quit in succession), then Q-Blue will exit immediately, without any of those requesters. But there is one more thing it checks before quitting. That is whether you have made any modifications to your tagline file that might need to be saved. As explained in section 10.9, a requester may appear at the time the tagline file is unloaded, allowing you to save any changes, or discard them (quit without saving) or cancel your Quit command.

PART IV: CONCLUSION

12) AUTHOR SUPPORT

12.1) How to contact the author

If you have any questions about the program, you should email me at paul@paulkienitz.net.  Many other contact addresses were given in the earlier versions of this manual — email, Fidonet, and postal. Every one of those addresses is invalid now. None of the Fido sites or email hosts exist anymore, and I have moved twice since the days when I accepted money for this program.

12.2) Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to many people who helped make Q-Blue a success. I can’t name them all, but I think I can at least cover most of them by categories. So, I express thanks to the following people:

George Hatchew, who got the project started by giving me the chance to support his Blue Wave mail format on the Amiga before it was made public, just because I said I thought I could do it.

Glenn Schworak, who responded to Q-Blue 0.7's worst bug by writing Q-Fix, a band-aid which let people use 0.7 with packets from Maximus and other slightly nonstandard mail systems which it couldn’t read otherwise. He saved many customers for me when I fell down on the job of getting a prompt update out.

All of the people who beta tested various versions of Q-Blue and reported bugs, and everyone who sent me weird mail packets that made Q-Blue choke, and all those who sent me other problem reports or original suggestions for improvement. I hesitate to name some and leave out others, but I should mention Anthony Yee, Robert Sudbury, Ed Langkamp, Tomaz Borstnar, Terry Dailey, Liz Driver, Christopher S. Smith, Tony Summerfelt, Marshall Freedland, and Petar “Norge” Cuckovic.

Those who helped me work out the methods in sections 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8 for supporting CygnusEd and TurboText, neither of which I had any documentation for, including Per Jacobsen and Ralph Torchia, but especially Jon Peterson who loaned me two user manuals.

Jonathan Forbes for writing LX, and Mike “C-man” Austin for writing clones of the RequestFile and RequestChoice commands, all of which are used in the Install script. (The IsADir and XSkip commands used in installation are my own, as is the Future command in the same directory — source files are available on request. XSkip is simply a clone of the standard Skip command which does not become buggy when the script has very long lines in it.)

Goran Paulin, my registration agent in Eastern Europe, who has made it possible for many people who would not otherwise have done so to get registered copies.

And most of all, all those who became registered customers, especially those who registered the half-finished mess called Q-Blue 0.7. That money kept my head above water more than once during periods when I had no other income, and so gave me the chance to finish the newer versions.

The names Amiga, AmigaDOS, Workbench, ARexx, ConMan, ASDG, Oxxi, CygnusEd Professional, TurboText, Blue Wave, Silver Xpress, XNet, QMail, RoseMail, TomCat, wcMAIL, wcQWK, QSO, Valence, DLGQWK, MKQWK, JC-QWK, OLMS, NoSnail, MailManager +Plus+, TBBS, Maximus, SearchLight, WildCat!, EzyCom, RBBS, Remote Access, PCBoard, FidoPCB, InterPCB, FidoNet, Internet, MS-DOS, and IBM are trademarks of their respective owners.