Hello Jay.

04 Dec 02 11:33, you wrote to me:

 MG>> I don't run IIS, so I use the Mercury/Win32 e-mail server. It's

 JF> I've been toying with WinRoute here on my Windows 2000 box (and like
 JF> the features it offers very much, including ip forwarding (how the BBS
 JF> runs, actually), as well as NAT and its built in email server.  I
 JF> don't know if the email server could support antivirus scans or
 JF> anything, and I thought having Outlook with a web interface might be
 JF> nice....but i'm still on the cheap side of things for now....

Mercury has protocal modules that support POP3, SMTP, IMAP4, Finger,
PopPass, POP3 distributing services (for polling other POP3 servers) and
tight integration with Pegasus Mail, (utilizing user directories) which is
another product written by the author of Mercury. It has content control,
filtering rules, support for aliases, and full control over SMTP relaying.
It's quite full-featured...

 MG> JF>>  Also, how do you feel about the discontinued support for nt-4
 MG> JF>> ?

 MG>> Well, since Win 2000 is in reality Win NT v5.0, I guess it was
 MG>> inevitable. I must say, for it's age (released in 1996) it sure was
 MG>> advanced for it's time After struggling with mail hubbing and 24/7
 MG>> BBS stuff for a few years with W 95 and then Win 98, I now sure
 MG>> wished I'd started out with NT in the first place. I tried Linux
 MG>> along the way, and I liked it, but BBSing under it can pretty get
 MG>> complicated, while NT is a little more familiar, and older BBS
 MG>> st will still work under it.

 JF> I may have to take some time and play around with this package.  I'm
 JF> thinking (soon) I'll be converting my telnetable BBS from win95 (cause
 JF> it is strictly DOS based and I thought that would be the best
 JF> implementation for it, since the machine is a 100 mhz machine) to
 JF> NT-4. Moving to NT 4, though, I'll be changing computers to roughly a
 JF> 400 mhz. (I believe).  I'm still working on it. :)

If you want to maintain dial-up with a front end mailer for your BBS, it
can get complicated, because fossil support for NT is tricky, and not all
DOS mailers work with NT. The problem is that NT handles the passing of the
hot comm port radically differently from how Win 9x handles it. NT
dynamically assigns the comm port handle on the fly, while it's a set value
tied to the comm port number under Win 9x.

Argus is one front end that works with NT, and provides a special parameter
(%Z) that will work with DOS doors, but I couldn't get Mystic/DOS to work
with it. Some Win 32 based BBSes will work for dial up with Win32 based
mailers under NT, but not all of them. (And I've been unable to get some
Win32 based mailers to work for dial up.)

Mystic BBS is one package that has problems, even in the Win 32 version; so
I'm stuck having to continue running my BBS under Win 98 until James Coyle
releases an updated version. I've heard Maximus and ProBoard will work; not
sure about any others.


--- GoldED/386 3.0.1-dam3