I am announcing VSoup version 1.2.5, a Souper replacement for OS/2
users. It is the successor of the version 1.2, is still free (and
will be forever), source is included, it is still multi-threaded only
for news receiving. A enhanced version of YarnIo is contained, which
allows simultaneous exchange of news/mail (should be usable also with
Souper), dial in and so on.
This version is intended as a bugfix, but nevertheless contains some
new features. Most significant are:
- extended documentation available as .INF-file
- several utilities to make Yarn/VSoup operations more comfortable
I'd like to thank Barrie Smith for helping me with the documentation
and the three gamma testers Jim Holcomb, Kay Pyrtek and Ralph
D. Bednarski (although those three had not very much to do).
For new installers: pay attention to the installation section in the
documentation, also read the FAQ. For upgraders: read the history
section for advices what must be changed.
Especially the TZ setting seems to be a show stopper, because VSoup
will crash with an exception. This is a bug in the emx runtime and is
fixed in the newly released emxfix01 package.
Placed for downloading are:
- ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/os2/tcpip/news/vsoup125.zip
(at the moment ftp://ftp.leo.org/incoming/os2/vsoup125.zip)
- ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/incoming/vsoup125.zip, later on it can be
found at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/os2/internet/vsoup125.zip.
For information the feature & history list from 1.2 to 1.2.5 follows:
3 Features
==========
- Multithreaded news receiving is supported, anything between 1 and
10 threads can be started (default 4), and in addition there are
several possible strategies for fine tuning.
Multithreading gives a speed gain of 200%-500% depending on the
overall speed of the connection and the number of threads; on the
other hand multiple connections have a communication overhead
(i.e. the connections must be established, the groups selected).
Estimated loss is around 5%...
- all the packets are exchanged in SOUP format files, i.e. offline
readers expecting as input format either SOUP or USENET batch
format can be used together with VSoup1.2.5.
- VSoup1.2.5 generates a status message as incoming mail. (this is
not in the SOUP standard, but is recognized by Yarn). Normally
this message is only generated in case of failure (eg., cannot
select newsgroup) or when special events occur (eg., when new
newsgroups are added), but the generation can be forced to always
occur by means of a command line option.
- VSoup1.2.5 will show some statistic information about data transfer.
- Specification of the required servers is easy by using URLs on the
command line.
- It is possible to filter articles by header lines before retrieving
the body text, see kill file handling.
- VSoup1.2.5 detects too low throughput or stuck connections.
- VSoup1.2.5 knows about NNTP authentication.
- YarnIo, a script to do VSoup1.2.5 operation safely (without risk of
message loss etc.) is included in the archive. YarnIo is capable
of simultaneously receiving news from up to nine separate NNTP news
servers, posting news to NNTP, receiving mail from up to nine POP3
servers and sending mail to SMTP.
- Other utilities included are
OwnSoup
This, with the help of the Yarn import program, redirects
news articles matching a specific pattern into a separate
mail folder which will show up when you read your mail with
Yarn.
For example you can search newsgroups for any mention of
your name or any mention of a program you are interested in.
QSoup This appends mail and news messages to the Yarn reply
packet file for transmission by VSoup.
ConvSoup
This transforms all articles from binary SOUP format to
mailbox/USENET format.
- FAQ included.
- source code included.
- freeware according to GPL (without any warranty for correct
function etc.).
11 History
==========
Version 1.2.5
-------------
- Improved Documentation, thanks to Barrie Smith.
Documentation now in TXT and INF format available, thanks to emxdoc.
- SOUP format for import has been changed:
- .\STSMAIL.MSG has format "mn" (same as before)
- from POP3 incoming Mails have format "bn": binary 8-bit clean
mail format. This allows from headers in the first column of the
mail, i.e. mail handling is now transparent (old was "mn").
- news have format "Bn": binary 8-bit clean news format (old was
"un")
To allow the conversion to the old format ConvSoup has been added.
- Added OwnSoup which filters news articles containing a specific
pattern into a mail folder.
- Added QSoup to allow injection of messages into the SOUP reply
packet.
- YarnIo changes:
- YarnIo now only zips the SEND packets (this is to allow re-edit
of the replies). Received messages are imported via import -u.
If you have an older version of YARNIO.SET it must be updated.
- YarnIo now supports OwnSoup. To allow operation of OwnSoup the
entry preImportProg has been added to YARNIO.SET.
- YarnIo now supports up to nine NNTP servers for news reception
and up to nine POP3 servers for EMail reception.
- -T-1 disables throughput check completely.
- the <kill-section> for one <group> can now be seperated, e.g. the
kill file may now contain several "all" sections.
- now article ranges are allowed in the sendme of .\COMMANDS. This
is a non-standard SOUP extension.
- bug fixes:
- hostname is now fetched through TCP/IP API, no longer from
'internet settings'
- it was possible in -S2 that during final catchup of articles the
connections were changing group assignment on each fetched article
- catchup did not work as expected. It sets the %HOME%\NEWSRC, so
that in any case 'n' articles were read afterwards. Display now
shows groupLo & groupHi
- ^Z was not recognized correctly for %HOME%\NEWSRC & %HOME%\KILL
- Now again linked dynamically, ths EMX.DLL and EMXLIBCM.DLL are
required
- Lines containing a single '.' were aborting EMails, even if the
'.' is actually doubled for transfer. Don't know if this is an
SMTP bug. Appending a blank behind the '.' helped (i.e. ".. "
is actually transferred to the SMTP server). For news articles
it works without appending the blank.
- sockets are now opened in text mode, because all the RFCs
requires \r\n as a line delimiter.
-- Hardy Griech, Kurt-Schumacher-Str. 25/1, D-72762 Reutlingen