RS> Fairly gross problem with TinyPoint, or more specifically MAKEMAIL.BAT

DM> I don't think it was meant to be anything too fancy, but....

I still think its quite unacceptible to be doing no error checking at
all, particularly when the problem results in completely silent deletion
of a fucking great chunk of the mail. It wouldnt be quite so bad if the
result was a dud QWK which made it obvious that something had gone wrong.

RS> The problem is with the unzipping of the PKTs, and the > null on the
RS> ends of those lines.

DM> Yep.

RS> If you dont have enough free space, its quite possible for that to just
RS> fail to unzip one of the largest PKTs out of the archived PKT without a
RS> single hint of a problem, just silently carrys on regardless and a whole
RS> chuck of mail goes straight into the bin forever.

DM> I've had that problem once or twice, hence my requests from Paul for
DM> back messages.

Wouldnt be surprising if its whats just bitten Frank either, what with
the problem turning up after a while away, hence a lot of PKTs, hence a
need for rather more free space than usual.

DM> In the end, I've removed all the > NULL redirections, so at least
DM> I can get an error message and reprocess the received mail packets
DM> with MAKEMAIL.BAT.

Yeah, thats all I have done for now. Should really have added an explicit
check for the error status return from PKZip, only a tad more effort.
I'm planning a more comprehensive redo but am doing something else at the
moment.

DM> Not the best solution, but passable.

The main problem with that is that people tend to go away from the
machine or the window when that boring stuff is going on, particularly
if you get decent sized QWKs and thats likely to not be noticed. I think
the PKZip error status check is a lot more viable.

DM> I wouldn't suggest the TPOINT package for a novice because of these
DM> pitfalls though.

Yeah, thats the point I really didnt make clearly enough in my original,
the whole point of the TPOINT system is a minimal understanding system
for droids, the last thing a system like that should be doing is just
silently filing fucking great chunks of mail straight into the bin.

--- PQWK202