Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!sumax!halcyon!caladan.wa.com!stui
From: stui@caladan.wa.com (Stuart Burden)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: Re: UUCP for the mac? (was Re: Letter to Unix Today )
Message-ID: <b.1TPBZC@caladan.wa.com>
Date: 13 Sep 90 04:15:44 GMT
Reply-To: stui@caladan.wa.com
Organization: Caladan, Homeworld of House Atreides
Lines: 48

In article <26ED4F55.21783@ics.uci.edu>, nagel@wintermute.ics.uci.edu (Mark Nagel) writes:
  | There is Mac/gnuucp, which is available in /mac/think-c/programs (it
  | includes source) on ics.uci.edu (128.195.1.1) for anonymous ftp.  I
  | just tried it this weekend and it seems pretty nice.  An obvious
  | extension would be to build a nice interface around the main
  | uucico-like program, but the mail stack is pretty nice.

Well seeing there was so much chatter about gnuucp I went and downloaded
it and I'm not that impressed.  I think if MacUUPC users want to use
the hypercard stack as a front end for mail, then they may be quite
happy, but the back end, the uucp engine, looks just like MacUUPC.

But then, is sending mail all you want to do?.. if so then you might
opt for this option.  I used MacUUPC to run my site manually for well
over a year, and was not satisfied at all.  With the uMail beta I'm
grinning big time :-) .. It is just QUANTUM leaps ahead of MacUUPC
and gnuucp.. MacUUPC and gnuucp don't deliver power, but they provide
another way, for sure.

Ultimately it will depend on how much of a power user of mail you
are, and how much time you have to dink with something that just does
the job, rather than does the job well.

You CAN get MacUUPC to do news.. you just have to munge with the spool
files and build your own headers.. not that much fun but if you have
the time and patience it can be done!  I would think that
the same is true for gnuucp, as the docs did not mention news at all,
only mail.

Currently I'm taking USENET News every hour, automatically polled, weeded,
and propagated to other Macs on my appletalk net by uMail. In fact I'm doing
it all in the background right now (an ADSP session just transfered
400+K of news to a leaf node!!).  When I complete this article a call
will be automatically placed to my news server and the article will
be posted!  News and Mail is a piece of cake!

Again it comes down to how easy do you want it to be, and how powerful do
you want the software.  I settled for the ONLY solution available
to me when I used MacUUPC...  I don't have to settle for that kind
of overhead anymore, and that's important to me and my schedule :-)

I know it's not "proper" to talk about unreleased software, but Tim
has just done a stand up job with this application, and just a little
bit more patience will see it released.  I'm sure it will make a lot
of others, like myself, very very happy!

Stu.

--
stui@caladan.uucp
stui@caladan.wa.com