MBUTIL - RemoteAccess/QuickBBS Message Base Utility 1.10
Copyright (C) 1990 Gerard van der Land. All rights reserved.
Features
--------
* Sorting messages by board and post date and time
* Purging messages by number, date or received status
* Message base packing with AutoRenumber
* Reply chain linking and subject cleaning
* Creating index files and fixing all kinds of problems and errors
* Undeleting deleted messages
* Moving all messages in one board to another board
* Posting a file as a message
* Netmail Import .MSG ==> MSG*.BBS
* Netmail Export MSG*.BBS ==> .MSG (updates credit)
* Replacing up to 5 different tearlines in outgoing echomail messages
* Creating 'Outbound Traffic Report'
* Build-in help screens for all commands
* It does NOT require a specific BBS program, mailer or message
editor, as it uses its own control file and environment variable
* Writes logfile in FrontDoor, Opus, D'Bridge, Binkley and QuickBBS
format
Disclaimer, License and Other Important Stuff
---------------------------------------------
The following points must be considered, understood and agreed
upon BEFORE you use MBUTIL 1.10:
* MBUTIL is distributed as ShareWare, and not as FreeWare or Public
Domain!
* This documentation and the accompanying program is copyrighted
material by Gerard van der Land.
* Although care has been taken to write and test a program that does
what this documentation states, the program is provided as it is,
without warranty or guarantee of any kind, either expressed or
implied, as to the quality or performance of this program, except
that it will occupy disk space.
* The author will not be held liable to you or anyone for any direct,
indirect, incidental or consequential damages, including any lost
profits, lost savings which may result from the use or inability to
use this program.
Your use of the program constitutes your agreement to this
disclaimer and your release of the author from any form of liability
or litigation.
* You are granted limited license to use MBUTIL 1.10 and you are
encouraged to copy and distribute it in an unmodified way as much as
you want, as long as you still abide to the conditions mentioned
here and no money or other compensation is asked or accepted.
1
System Hardware and Software Requirements
-----------------------------------------
* An IBM PC, XT, AT or 100% compatible.
* The amount of RAM that should be available very much depends on
which command you are using and how big your message base is, but
around 300 KB should be enough in most cases. If you run it under
DoubleDOS/DesqView, just try. If there's not enough memory
available, MBUTIL will certainly let you know!
* Microsoft MS-DOS 3.00 / IBM PC-DOS 3.00 or above. MBUTIL was
successfully tested under MS-DOS 4.01.
* At least "FILES=15" (or more) in your CONFIG.SYS.
* A RemoteAccess 0.0x or QuickBBS 2.xx compatible message base.
Setup
-----
Before you use MBUTIL you should enter your information in the
control file MBUTIL.CTL using an ASCII text editor. Explanation of the
keywords is given there.
Environment Variable
--------------------
Usage:
SET MBU=
[]
To be able to run MBUTIL from any directory, you can use the MBU
environment variable. If MBUTIL can't find MBUTIL.CTL in the current
path, it will try the open the filename set with MBU. This can also be
useful for people having more than one message base, who can use SET
to select from their batch file which control file should be used.
is optional and is the default text color, which is also
used if the control file was found in the current path. It is
calculated as follows:
+ (16 * )
Colors:
0 Black 4 Red
1 Blue 5 Magenta
2 Green 6 Yellow
3 Cyan 7 White
Add 8 for highlighted foreground colors. is 7 by default
(White text on a Black background).
Example:
SET MBU=C:\RA\MBUTIL.CTL 3
2
Specifying Boards
-----------------
If you must specify a , you can use the area tag (if you
have specified an AreasFile in the control file), or #.
A special fixed area name is "NETMAIL", which will always refer
to your NetmailBoard, if defined.
Help Screens
------------
If you run 'MBUTIL', you will see the following help screen:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| MBUTIL - RemoteAccess/QuickBBS Message Base Utility 1.10 |
| Copyright (C) 1990 Gerard van der Land. All rights reserved. |
| |
| Usage: |
| |
| MBUTIL [] |
| |
| Commands: |
| |
| Export Export netmail messages and replace tearlines |
| Import Import netmail messages |
| Index Create new index files |
| Link Create reply chains and clean subjects |
| Move Move messages in one board to another board |
| Pack Pack the message base files |
| Post Post a file as message in a specified board |
| Purge Delete messages according to age or number |
| Sort Sort unread or all messages by board/date/time |
| Undelete Undelete deleted messages |
| |
| Run 'MBUTIL ?' to get information about . |
| |
| C:\RA>_ |
| |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Example:
MBUTIL Purge ?
This will give you information about the Purge command and its
parameters. If a parameter is missing or invalid, MBUTIL will also
show you a help screen.
3
Sort
----
Usage:
MBUTIL Sort [-All] [-Backup] [-Pack]
The Sort command can be used to sort all unread messages by
board number and post date and time. This has two advantages:
+ When using combined read mode to read new messages for example,
you won't see messages from different boards mixed up.
+ It reduces the chance that you read a reply to a message before
you actually read the message that was replied to, which
happened pretty often to me and which was actually the reason
why I started writing MBUTIL in the first place! But from one
thing came another...
Reading replies before the original messages is in most cases
caused by echo mail processors that don't sort incoming mail
packets, but I think that DOESN'T HAVE TO BE the case, since a reply
can simply have a shorter or faster PATH than the message that was
replied to.
MBUTIL checks if there is enough disk space available. After
that it scans LASTREAD.BBS to find the highest message that was read
by all users. MBUTIL assumes there are actually messages to sort and
starts rewriting MSGHDR.BBS and MSGTOIDX.BBS while scanning
MSGHDR.BBS to find out where to start sorting. I could have used
MSGIDX.BBS for this, but the current way is more reliable and works
faster if there actually are messages to sort, which will most
likely be the case if you run Sort only each time new messages were
tossed in to the message base.
MBUTIL will remove all reply chains while sorting, so you
should run 'MBUTIL Link' each time you used Sort. The next version
might Link while Sorting. This version can sort up to about 9360
messages.
You can use '-All' to sort the entire message base, but THIS
IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR BBS SYSTEMS, as IT DOES NOT UPDATE THE
LASTREAD.BBS POINTERS (I suggest you delete LASTREAD.BBS if you use
this switch). It was only added because some POINTS in the beta-team
requested it.
Switches:
-All Sort entire message base (ignores LASTREAD pointers)
-Backup Keep the original MSGHDR.BBS as backup (.BAK)
-Pack Remove header records of deleted messages
The rest of MBUTIL is actually a clone of TosScan(q) Message
Utility (TSUTIL) 1.00, with some additions and improvements here and
there. TSUTIL was written by Mats Wallin and Joaquim Homrighausen. I
hope they won't be angry with me! 😉
4
Purge
-----
Usage:
MBUTIL Purge [-File ] [] [-Convert