Message Base Manager Topics Menu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The items on this menu represent the constituent parts of a .QWK mail packet - Hello, News, NewFiles, Bulletins, Messages, BBS Info and Goodbye. Use the cursor keys, PgUp and PgDn to highlight the required Topic. Then press Enter or Tab. More Help can be obtained by pressing F1 again once 'inside' the selected Topic. Tab sometimes gives a broader function than Enter. For instance, Tab allows you to view ALL 'NewFiles' to date whereas Enter only shows you today's NewFiles (once). Tab also allows entry to items which show 'none unread' when Enter simply bypasses the item. At the Bulletins topic, pressing Enter initiates 'quick browse conference 0' mode, skipping to next item (NewFiles) if there are no unread bulletins in conference 0. Tab gives 'general browse all conferences' mode and enters the Bulletins area even if there are no unread bulletins. At the Hello, News, NewFiles and Goodbye topics, pressing Shift/Tab causes Power-QWK to call another program (of your choice) to process the associated file (similar action to pressing Shift/Tab to read a Bulletin). If you read one of these files using Tab or Return then, if the file is 64Kb or less, Power-QWK uses its fast, in-memory display routines to give the best possible display with the maximum number of built-in features. Just about every file you ever receive will fall within this category. If the file is larger than 64Kb then Power-QWK sets no limit at all on the size of the file but screen updates are performed directly from the disc. This means that PgUp when there has been no preceding PgDn (e.g., PgUp following skip to end-of-file) is slower than Power-QWK's normal display. Forward reading and PgDn are performed at normal speed. Power-QWK does not support Ansi files larger than 64Kb. If you need to browse a large file rather than just reading it then use Shift/Tab to call your favourite Listing program. You can also use Shift/Tab to pass Hello, News and Goodbye files to programs such as TheDraw and UUEncode. At the Messages topic, pressing Enter causes entry to the Messages area only if there is unread mail. Pressing Tab forces entry to the area, whether or not there is unread mail. On entry to the area, Power-QWK checks for the existence of a .REP file in your upload directory. If one exists, it allows the option of either attaching to it, to continue adding messages or editing existent messages; or deleting it; or appending its contents to the Prune Archive (if you keep a Prune Archive). The latter facility is intended to aid those users who do not wish to download their own replies from online services. It allows your own messages to be read at a later date without going online. Messages appended to Prune Archive in this manner are given a message number of 00 (the true online message number being unknown). This causes your own messages to move to the head of the list when you sort on message number within the Message Pick List. At the Hello, News, NewFiles and Goodbye topics, pressing Del will cause Power-QWK to delete the message base file associated with that topic, if it exists. Power-QWK asks for confirmation before performing the deletion. D - Specify whether Power-QWK is to date/time stamp messages. This allows you to tell Power-QWK to leave the message header date/time field blank for the current online service, rather than inserting date-written (obtained from your PC clock). For Tomcat services, a blank date/time stamp tells the mail door to stamp the message with the date/time uploaded. For other services, you should only tell Power-QWK to blank this field if you have configured the online door to date stamp messages for you. E - Enable processing of old QWK packets. This simply resets Power-QWK's 'Last Message Processed' date. This enables, for the next Power-QWK session only, processing of out-of-date QWK files automatically, without first prompting for user confirmation. G - Gateway to DOS. R - Call the Power-QWK Rebuild facility. This allows you to do any of the following either for a single conference or for all conferences: - Rebuild Message Index; - Validate, and correct if necessary, Power-QWK's 'current position' pointers, optionally marking all messages as 'Read' or 'Unread' at the same time. You may also Rebuild the Bulletins Area of the current message base. S - Sort NewFiles. ALWAYS take a backup copy of NEWFILES.DAT, plus any other NEWFILES.* files before using this facility. This is a safety precaution against loss of data due to the file NEWFILES.IGN being set up incorrectly (see below). This facility sorts the contents of the New Files listing of the current message base (i.e., the file NEWFILES.DAT). If other files exist named NEWFILES.* then they are merged into NEWFILES.DAT as the sort proceeds. Files with an extension of .BAK or .IGN are not so merged. There may be up to a maximum of about 16 megabytes of such files. The sort program ignores blank lines in the input stream. If the file NEWFILES.IGN exists then the sort facility will also ignore lines in the input stream which begin with any of the strings in NEWFILES.IGN. NEWFILES.IGN may contain up to fifty strings, each on a separate line. If a string ends with a quote (") character then the quote character is ignored. This enables strings to be used which end with space characters. e.g., the string ABC " would be treated as the four characters A, B, C, space. The NEWFILES.DAT produced by Qmail services has variable length multi-line descriptions which make it unsuitable for the Power-QWK sort facility unless you are prepared to lose all but the first line of the description. This may be achieved by placing the line " in NEWFILES.IGN. The same applies to NEWFILES in old-Tomcat two-line format. These may only be included in the new Power-QWK sort if NEWFILES.IGN contains the line " to force the second line of each file description to be ignored. As an example, the PQ distribution file set contains the NEWFILES.IGN used by the author on the Direct-Line service. NOTE WELL! NEWFILES.IGN is message-base-specific. It must therefore reside in message base subdirectories, NOT in the Power-QWK main directory. Any NEWFILES.IGN which exists in the Power-QWK main directory will be ignored. Power-QWK always APPENDS each day's new files to NEWFILES.DAT so it's worth running the sort maybe once a month to get things back in order again.