G'morning William,

 WM> BTW, why did you start in email but continue here?

Hate emails, love fidonet, couldn't use BBS without mmail or 
slmr...

 WM> support long file names, it only did so under 98 -- not XP. (Actually,
 WM> I was surprised to notice that MultiMail/DOS supported LFNs under XP.
 WM> It doesn't under NT, though it does under 9x.) You never mentioned what
 WM> OS you were using -- and it makes a BIG difference as regards long file
 WM> names -- but based on this experiment and your report, I'm guessing it
 WM> was XP. No?

No - its W2K (as mentioned earlier somewhere..)

 WM> If you had used the Win32 version of MultiMail -- even calling PKZIP
 WM> for DOS -- you wouldn't have had the problem. Interestingly,
 WM> MultiMail/XT also would've worked. But the "DOS" (DJGPP)
version, even
 WM> when seeing the "short form" of the name in the MMAIL.RC,
expands it
 WM> when calling the archiver. (I'm not quite sure why, yet. It's something
 WM> that happens in the system libraries; all this is largely transparent
 WM> to MultiMail proper.)

I also hate windoze - love DOS....

 WM> Generally, under Windows NT/2000/XP, you'd be better off with 
the Win32
 WM> version of MultiMail anyway. Under 9x it's a toss-up.

 MM> OK, so I seem to have found a weak link in mminstallation procedures;
 MM> add to your excellent installation manual the instruction "Do NOT
 MM> attempt to install MM in a directory called MULTIMAIL !".

 WM> This is really a PKZIP issue, not a MultiMail issue. And, sorry, but
 WM> since you started with 2.04g -- a DOS program that predates Win 95 by a
 WM> couple of years -- I think you should've anticipated that _it_ wouldn't
 WM> support long file names.

Its what the BBS I use depended on for QWKing - but we've all 
moved up to 250 now, it seems.

 MM> I got mad and started from scratch - using a MMAIL directory
 WM> As I suggested in the first place. ;-)

Mmmm - musta missed that bit...

 MM> Sorry to have alarmed you unnecessarily,

 WM> Don't worry; I wasn't alarmed. :-) In fact, it was interesting, because
 WM> I discovered a few nuances of LFNs that I hadn't been aware of.

Good oh !  The lfns seem to be a bit of kludge to accomodate 
incoherent computerists like the clericals who work around my 
school (directories that read like War & Peace rather than a file 
list).

Anyway,  it all seems to be working from this machine OK - with 
updated proggies all about.  Thanks again.

:-))
 
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