-=> Brian Iglesias wrote to William McBrine <=-

 BI> i currently use multimail on dialup wildcat bbs for .qwk and BW
 BI> formats.

There's a BW door for Wildcat?

 BI> how do i use soup/omen/opx formats?

It's a question of what doors are available on a given BBS. For OPX, it's
the Silver Xpress door. Usually, OPX is slightly preferable over QWK when
both are available, but the Wildcat SX door isn't very good; on that
system, it's a toss-up. OMEN is used mostly on BBSes in Scandinavia, as I
understand it, and is again slightly preferable over QWK if you have the
choice. If you don't have the choice, then don't worry about it. :-)

SOUP is a bit different, in that you'd normally create the packets on your
own machine (or, possibly, an ISP's shell account) instead of a BBS. SOUP
stands for Simple Offline Usenet Packet, though it also supports email. You
can use a program like UQWK, VSoup or Souper to create the packets and post
replies.

 BI> how do i multimail for internet mail and usenet?

Generally, the best way is SOUP. Some BBSes also support one or both, and
there are BW extensions to make that work fairly well, plus limited support
in OPX. Doing it via QWK is possible, but not recommended.

There was a standalone Internet  BW program being developed a while back
(like the SOUP packers, but for BW), but I don't think it ever came to
fruition. Possibly the author gave up when I told him about SOUP. :-/

 BI> can you release the ansi viewer module as a win32 standalone program?
 BI> this would help ansi art colletors such as myself
 BI> in viewing .ans file formats. ansi.sys can be dangerous.

I've thought about that (though more for the benefit of Unix, where
MultiMail's IBM PC -> curses ACS character mapping is unique, AFAIK). I
wasn't sure there'd be any interest. I do know that there are other
standalone ANSI viewing programs available, at least for DOS.

... Xerox never comes up with anything original.
--- MultiMail/Linux v0.45