How to read usenet news with MINUET and PMAIL.

Pegasus Mail for DOS is the ultimate mail client for this

fossil, but reliable operating system.

It has excellent reading capabilities, but no simple

possibility of working with usenet news. It supports

noticeboards that can be acceded from the main menu.

Minuet for DOS is an internet client that has excellent

capabilities to download usenet news, but is not very good at

reading them because it lacks MIME and wordwrap of long

lines. Both programs run in DOS, needing only a 286

or better and 1 MBy of memory.

Pmail and Minuet download and read new mail and news in

individual files. They are not compatible because Minuet

downloads each message as a file named with consecutive

numbers and null extension (i.e. 12345678. ), but PMail can

only read messages in its noticeboard as files with extension

..CNB (i.e. 122345678.CNB).

You could download usenet news with Minuet, rename all the

files by adding the extension .CNB and then read them with

Pmail. This is not very easy, as Minuet downloads each

message in diferent subdirectories, one for each newsgroup.

A better way is to modify PMAIL.EXE so that it searches for

files with null extension instead of .CNB. You can do this

yourself.

Modifying is easily done by editing PMAIL.EXE in two

places. You simply have to find the three letters CNB and

replace them with three spaces.

1)- In autoexec.bat add: SET NB=c:\minuet. This is the way

to tell Pmail where the Notice Board is located.

2)- In c:\minuet add file: NB.ID with the following

content:

Administrator: myname

(should be the same name you use when you login Pmail i.e.

the name after the -u option)

You can also put here:

Short name: (directory name if empty)

Long name: (the name of the newsgroup)

Expiry: (How long to keep the messages, you need a other tool to

delete expired messages).

3)- A NB.ID in every minuet newsgroup directory, otherwise it

will NOT be detected by Pmail as a newsbox!

If you want I can send PMAIL 3.51 to you.

Minuet can be downloaded from www.fdisk.com.

The command-line interface is a vestige of an era of macho computing.

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Ing. Alejandro Lieber

Rosario Argentina

dos[at]lieber.com.ar

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