Subj : Re: Problem with filenames containing spaces
To   : Oli
From : James Coyle
Date : Wed Jan 19 2022 11:14 am

 Ol> few mailers that cannot cope with the standard \x##. I believe they all
 Ol> send the M_NUL VER command. Why not auto-detect the broken mailer and
 Ol> switch to the incorrect escape \## automatically?

Yes that would be a good solution maybe a little more challenging to implement, but thats a good idea too!

Unfortunetly those legacy mailers are out there although less and less these days.  People can upgrade to a newer version of Mystic if they are running and old release so that should be fine.  But some people (believe it or not) still use Argus and especially like IREX.  My Fido hub is using an IREX version from like 1999 to this day.

 Ol> Is there any other mailer than Argus and Irex that doesn't understand
 Ol> \x##?

The only thing I know of is Argus and some if its clones, versions of IREX, and older Mystic versions.  I do remember testing against some Argus spin offs that actually did update to support \x## so its not all of them.  Some were updated.

My findings were three types of escaping:

1) Those that escape with \## exclusively and work with nothing else
   Argus, IREX, older versions of Mystic

2) Those that escape with \x## but still allow \## from the mailer side
   BinkD (I think MBSE does too)

3) Those that escape with \x## and only work with \x## disallowing \##
   Some Argus spin-offs like Radius, Synchronet's BinkIT, maybe others?

I don't know where BBBS fits in.

Both MBSE and newer Mystic provides the option to support \## or \x## escaping per connection as noted.  This seems to be what FTS recommends as a way to handle this mess.  It does seem to be a viable solution but your idea is great too!

 Ol> * I believe the inclusion of \## in FTS-1026 was more harmful than it
 Ol> did any good in the long term.

Yeah its very confusing.

Another confusing thing (and is partially responsible for how Mystic got it wrong originally) is that when you look up BinkP on Wikipedia it links to the old specifications released by the authors of Argus.  If I remember correctly it was really difficult to even find FTS documentation when I was first implementing FTN into Mystic so these kind of links proved to be a pain point.

My testbed was Argus, IREX, and BinkD and \## was the only thing that worked with all of them as I recall, and it matches what Wikipedia says so thats what Mystic used back then...

Unfortunately that is wrong as I later found Radius mailers that only supported \x## and I believe BinkIT falls into this category as well.

I think in hindsight it might have been better for FTS to leave it as \## since legacy mailers used it and could not be updated, but it is what it is!

Thank you for the kind and constructive response :)

.... Honk if you love peace and quiet!

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 2022/01/14 (Windows/64)
 * Origin: Sector 7 * Mystic WHQ (1:129/215)

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