In some ways, InterCon's UUCP/Connect scares me. It's a massive program that does almost everything under the UUCP sun, and most of the time it performs admirably. Of course, for the $295 price tag that it carries, it better do a lot of shining. Luckily, for the most full-featured and professional UUCP implementation on the Macintosh, you cannot go wrong with UUCP/Connect. Just so you know my history with UUCP/Connect, I used it from some time in 1991 until late 1994, when I finally switched from a UUCP connection to a direct Internet connection. Thus, everything below is the result of years of use and probably hundreds of thousands of messages in traffic.
In some ways, UUCP/Connect is harder to configure than the simpler and smaller implementations of UUCP. In part this difficulty has to do with the fact that from UUCP/Connect's massive hierarchical Configuration menu, you can configure the way the email and newsreading work, the UUCP communications process, the background tasks that enable UUCP/Connect to operate unattended, the Call Listener that allows others to call in for UUCP email and news, and a host of other features, including the extensions that add autoreply and autoforward features (see figure 15.28).
Figure 15.28: UUCP/Connect Configuration menu.
Most of the necessary UUCP configuration goes on in the Environment Configuration dialog box and its subboxes, indicated by the Set Misc, Set Paths, and Compression buttons (see figure 15.29).
Figure 15.29: UUCP/Connect Environment Configuration dialog.
There's no way I could walk you through all the possibilities here; luckily, UUCP/Connect comes with a decent manual, although it doesn't answer every question you might have (as if anything ever does!). Perhaps my main complaint with UUCP/Connect's configuration process is that the various different sections are laid out strangely, and they often interact in ways that may not be initially obvious. In the Environment Configuration dialog box, for instance, I have defined nwnexus as my mail and news server. If you look at the Configuration menu in figure 15.28, you see entries for Mail Server and News Server. The entries in your Environment Configuration dialog determine which of the potentially many servers show up when you choose Mail Server from the hierarchical Configuration menu (see figure 15.30).
Figure 15.30: UUCP/Connect Server configuration.
As you can see, UUCP/Connect does away with all of those nasty text files in specific formats in favor of a decent, if not perfect, Macintosh interface. Its flexibility is also unparalleled. You can use any of the Mac's Communications Toolbox tools to connect, which means that UUCP/Connect can not only dial a modem, but also distribute UUCP mail and news over an AppleTalk network with Apple's ADSP tool. This capability makes UUCP/Connect useful for an organization that wants to have one copy call out and then distribute the mail to other copies around a network.
Note: In theory, you could even use a Telnet tool such as TGE TCP Tool (from Tim Endres, who also wrote UUCP/Connect) to connect to a UUCP server over a MacTCP-based connection. There are some low-level technical quirks, so this may not be as simple as it sounds.
I don't want to dwell too much on UUCP/Connect's configuration because it has so many options and preferences that it would take ten pages just to pay lip service to them. But I cannot resist showing you one more dialog box that will give you an idea of UUCP/Connect's flexibility (see figure 15.31).
Figure 15.31: UUCP/Connect Mail & News Preferences dialog.
You get to the Mail & News Preferences dialog (confusingly, in my opinion) by selecting Preferences from the hierarchical Configuration menu, and then clicking on the Mail & News button at the top of the resulting dialog box (which has six different buttons, each leading to yet another dialog box of preferences).
I like the way UUCP/Connect lets you toggle your signature separately for mail and news, but I wish it allowed you to add your signature on a piece-by-piece basis. I hate traipsing through all those dialog boxes just to turn off my signature for a single letter. Even with QuicKeys, it's a pain.
In general, using UUCP/Connect is a dream. Although it certainly has quirks and limitations, it has handled tremendous amounts of mail for me. After you figure out your favorite way of doing something, it's a fast, slick interface.
Sending a letter or posting an article in UUCP/Connect is simple -- you fill in a header form, using a pop-up menu for commonly used aliases (see figure 15.32).
Figure 15.32: UUCP/Connect Compose Mail dialog with aliases showing.
Although the pop-up menu works well for a relatively small number of aliases, it starts to slow down once you have fifty or so. Luckily, you can always simply type the alias manually.
Note: Here's a nice touch: If you hold down the Option key while you're selecting an alias from the pop-up menu, UUCP/Connect puts the address itself into the Compose Mail dialog rather than the alias name. This capability can be handy when you need to send someone an address of a friend for whom you already have an alias.
UUCP/Connect doesn't force you to fill in even the To field until you try to send the letter. This is nice, because there's no telling if you'll want to address the letter before or after you write it. If you click on the OK button, a bare-bones text editing window appears -- so barren, in fact, that I'm not going to bother to show you. It looks like almost every other text editing window you've seen. Here's primarily where I think UUCP/Connect falls down. Unlike even some of the shareware programs, it does not rewrap paragraphs as you edit. Although lines wrap as you type them originally, that's only half the battle. Having to select some text and choose the Fit Selection command from the Edit menu is a pain. I cannot imagine this problem not being fixed in the next release, because it's a glaring oversight in an otherwise well-conceived package.
Note: UUCP/Connect's editor has been revamped for the most recent release, 1.8, and after using 1.8 for a day, I went back the 1.6v2 version that I had been using previously. The problem now is that InterCon added support for WorldScript to sell UUCP/Connect in Japan. In the process, InterCon made the text wrap properly all the time, but also removed a basic feature that moves the cursor to the end of the last line if you press the down arrow while on the last line. This may sound minor, but I do a lot of editing on the last line of messages (not surprisingly) and removing this feature meant that I had to click the mouse button to get back to the end of the line. There weren't other major changes, so I went back without any trouble.
UUCP/Connect has one neat shortcut if you're writing a letter. If you need to address it after the fact or change the subject, instead of going to the Mail menu and choosing Modify Letter Info, you can simply click on the New Letter tag in the lower left of the text editing window. Clicking on the same spot when you're reading a letter displays the entire header, which is often useful if you have abbreviated headers turned on in the preferences.
After you're finished writing a letter, you can send it in a number of ways. You can go to the Mail menu and choose Mail Letter. Or you can click on the icon in the Functions palette that means the same thing. Or you can do as I do: Close the window and click on the default Send button when UUCP/Connect asks what you want to do with the letter. Because I always want to get the letter off the screen after I'm finished anyway, sending it this way works best for me.
Note: After seeing how Eudora handles reading and sending mail, I wrote a series of QuicKeys macros that make it simple to do things such as "send the current message, delete the original, and open the next message."
I should talk a bit more about the Functions palette, because it makes a number of actions easier in UUCP/Connect. Because many of the buttons work primarily when reading email, take a look at a UUCP/Connect mailbox at the same time (see figure 15.33).
Figure 15.33: UUCP/Connect mailbox.
Let's take it from the top. UUCP/Connect puts the name of the mailbox in the window title; mailboxes are in the same Unix mailbox format that other programs use and their names are live -- in the sense that if you send a message to [email protected], UUCP/Connect creates a mailbox called joe and tells me that I've got a new mailbox. This feature provides a simple way for multiple people to use the same copy of UUCP/Connect on the same computer.
Note: And, with either the UUCP/Connect client version or Eudora, as I explained previously in this chapter, multiple users don't even have to share the same machine to use the same copy of UUCP/Connect.
In the first line, UUCP/Connect tells how many messages are in the mailbox, which one is selected, and how big it is in lines and bytes. If you select multiple messages (contiguous or not), UUCP/Connect informs you how many you have selected. This is helpful when you perform a Find on a mailbox and the Find matches some unknown number of messages.
In the body of the mailbox, which is a completely resizable window, UUCP/Connect displays a mail status icon, the name or userid of the sender, and the subject of the letter. I rely heavily on UUCP/Connect's icons here because they indicate if I've read a message, replied to it, saved it to disk, or deleted it. It may sound trivial, but eventually I forget whether I've replied to a letter. These icons remind me.
Note: UUCP/Connect doesn't record these icon settings permanently until you close the mailbox. This means that if you crash while a mailbox is open, you lose track of which messages you've replied to or deleted. It's a pain, although certainly better than actually losing the messages.
UUCP/Connect's Functions palette has nine buttons, of which I use only the last six. The first three are clumsier than using the keyboard and mouse shortcuts; they are, respectively, Create New Letter/Article, Read Message, and Send Message. The next six, though, are extremely important: Reply, Forward, Followup, Save to Disk, Print, and Trash.
Reply, Forward, and Followup all work on the currently selected item or items in a mailbox or on the frontmost message window. If you select a portion of the original message, clicking on the Reply or Forward button creates a new message with the selected text included as a quote. If you don't select any text, UUCP/Connect quotes the entire message by default, although a simple Select All selects the message to replace it as soon as you start typing.
Note: In my opinion, all email programs and newsreaders should use this Reply-With-Selected concept by default to help users to quote more carefully.
The Save to Disk button works in several different ways depending on where you are and what you have selected. If you're reading a message, clicking on the Save button saves that message to the disk file you specify. However, if you're in the mailbox with one or more messages selected, clicking the Save button gives you the choice of creating a new file or appending to an existing file, with or without headers, and concatenating the files if you have more than one selected.
The Trash button is handy because, even though you can just press the Delete key when you have one or more messages selected in the mailbox, if you click on the Trash button after you finish reading a message, UUCP/Connect closes the message window and marks the message for deletion, all in one swell foop.
Note: As long as you don't move your Functions palette, you can define a QuicKeys macro to click on that spot. I assigned that macro to Control-Delete, and it's a much faster way of deleting messages.
Messages marked for deletion don't actually disappear until you close the mailbox or newsgroup window (although you can choose an option that lets UUCP/Connect delete all the newsgroup articles that you've read when you close the mailbox). This feature avoids the problem of expiring messages.