Subj : Re: can someone help please?
To   : Jimmy Day
From : Rob Strover
Date : Fri Sep 27 2002 12:49 pm

-=> Jimmy Day wrote to All <=-

 JD> 1)  What is the difference between QWK and BW mail packets?

In a nutshell - almost everything :-)

Seriously, the differences are too great to document here.  Look at the 
URL http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?s=internet and download the
Bluewave 3.00 document file on that page. Then go to the third page of
internet-related stuff and download the QWK format document file.

***************************************************************************
* Be warned that these files mostly contain info for serious programmers, *
* but there are some notes that *might* be of more general interest.      *
***************************************************************************

 JD> 2)  The BBS has a Blue Wave mail door, it downloads in ZIP format - so
 JD> what happened to QWK and BW files?

The QWK and BW files are contained in the downloaded mail packets. Even though
the files have non-ZIP extensions they can be open with a program such as
WinZip or even (via command line) PKZip.

 JD> 3)  Some packets give the error "control.dat not found" - tried on 4
 JD> different OLRs, and PKUNZIP -t shows that there is indeed NO
 JD> control.dat file. Looks like all the other files are there.  So why no
 JD> control.dat file?  Maybe someone could point me to an explanation of
 JD> the structure of these various file types?

Not sure, but IIRC the control.dat file has something to do with the QWK
format, so the doco at the URL mentioned above may address this issue.

 JD> 4)  Some packets also give unpack errors, CRC errors.  What's that
 JD> mean?

I can only speculate that the programs which "zipped" the various reader
files into the file packet format did not operate correctly.  That's just
a thought, but I could be wrong!

 JD> 5)  As for reply packets - what's the difference between *.NEW and
 JD> *.REP? Maybe one goes with QWK and the other with BW?

Yes, *.NEW for BW type reply files and *.REP for QWK ones.

Details of these formats are contained in the info downloadable from the
URL I mentioned above.

 JD> Please bear with me, as I guess I've been spoiled by Microsoft!  Now I
 JD> know that some folks here don't particularly like Microsoft, or at
 JD> least MS Windows, I can sure understand that!  However, that said, I
 JD> will state that in my few months of BBSing and particularly with using
 JD> off-line readers, I have gotten more error messages than with 5 years
 JD> of DOS, Win3.1x, and Win9.x put together.  Or so it seems <sigh>; it
 JD> seems like one needs to be a programmer to configure some of these
 JD> OLRs, and that's way beyond my meager abilities.

I'm not sure I'd agree that OLRs and BBSing are that complex, but certainly
different from the Windows world.  In any case, I'm a programmer so my
judgement is probably suspect in this case :-) 

Happy BBSing, and I hope this info makes things a bit simpler.

	Rob.

 
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