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===ECHOMAIL TUTORIAL===
This is a brief tutorial about a new Fido
phenomena called EchoMail. The first half of this
tutorial is for users. It explains how you enter
messages, and use EchoMail to send messages to
others. The second half is for EchoMail sysops. It
is to explain how to implement EchoMail on your
board.
===USER'S TUTORIAL===
What EchoMail does for you is allow you to
talk to people on other Fido boards across the
country without having to know who, or where they
are. You can tell an EchoMail Area from the Area
Name. It will say something about echo, mirrors,
national conference, etc. All you have to do is
enter a message in one of these areas, and it is
automatically sent out to any and all Fido boards
participating in that particular area.
===CAUTION! PRIVATE MESSAGES ECHO===
All the messages in each echo area are sent
out to other boards, even if they are labeled
private. Also, anyone with Sysop priveleges can
read a private message. Beware! If you want to send
a private message to someone, try to use another
area besides an Echo Area.
===IF YOU DO NOT WANT A MESSAGE ECHOED===
EchoMail does provide a way to enter a message
into an area and have it stay locally on that
board. In order to do that, you enter a key word on
the first line of the message. If you enter the
word 'NOECHO' as the first line of a message, all
in caps, without leading spaces, the message will
appear in that area only on the board it was
entered on.
Now, all you have to do to use EchoMail, is
read the messages in the Echo Areas, and enter or
reply to them. EchoMail takes care of the rest.
Please participate in EchoMail with us. We provide
this as a sevice, and would really enjoy seeing it
put to use. Enjoy!
===ODDITIES AND IDEOSYNCHROSIES===
At the end of each message in an Echo Area,
there are several lines of information about that
particular message's travel across the country. The
first is call the Origin line, and shows the name
of the board that the message was entered on. That
name may or may not be a familiar name to you. At
the end of the line there are two numbers in
parenthesis separated by a slash (/). This is the
address of the originating bulletin board. The
first number is called the net number, and the
second is called the node number. The net number
defines a geographical area. I.E. Dallas is net
124. The node number refers to the particular board
within that area that originally sent the message.
This board number is 210. You can find a listing of
all the net/node numbers in the entire world in a
file called 'FIDOLIST.BBS' on almost any Fido
board.
The rest of the message is composed of a
series of lines that start with the keyword 'SEEN-
BY'. This is a list of Fido net/nodes that have
already received that message. This is how EchoMail
tells whether it has already sent a message or not.
You can usually ignore the information in the seen-
by line unless you are trying to figure out how a
message got from there to here. The seen-by is used
by the sysop to determine if he is distributing
mail to all the nodes as efficiently as possible.
Sometimes you will see the same message twice
in an Echo Area. This is the most annoying part of
using an EchoMail area. Since the messages pass
from node to node through the phone lines,
sometimes a message get garbled or not all of a
group of messages get passed down the line. When
this happens, Fido decides it is better to resend
all the messages and make sure at least one set
gets through intact. Sometimes this results in
having the same message sent twice.
The rest of this tutorial is designed to help
new sysops set up an EchoMail area on there board.
Unless you are trying to set up a Fido or EchoMail,
you can press Control-C or Control-K to return to
the board now. I hope you enjoy national
conferencing with EchoMail!
===NEW ECHOSYSOP'S TUTORIAL===
If you are a Fido sysop trying to set up
EchoMail, this section should help you. EchoMail
allows you to share common message bases among
several Fidos. In fact, some of the conferences
have a few hundred boards participating. Echo has
added greatly to the communications abilities of
Fido, and has helped a lot of us get to know each
other. The problem with regular netmail is that you
have to =know= someone to send mail to, or you have
to be replying to a message that they sent you.
EchoMail simplifies this. You 'hook in' to
EchoMail, and the conversations are already there.
EchoMail is not free. Someone has to pay for
transmitting the messages just like regular
netmail. The established procedure is to find
someone either locally, or in a low toll zone for
you to poll. Other arrangements are made
frequently, this is just the most common method of
approaching it. Unless the person you are attached
to is using a business line to make his calls, or
is a local call for you, you will probably end up
having to pay for the service.
On a per message basis, EchoMail is cheaper
than regular mail, but the volume is EXTREMELY
higher. This means you can expect your telephone
bill to increase dramatically if you decide to join
in EchoMail. However, the information gained, and
the enjoyment of having ongoing conversations with
people around the world far outweigh the costs.
=== HOOKING INTO AN ECHOMAIL CONFERENCE ===
Probably the first step in linking into an
EchoMail conference is to contact your network, or
region host. These people are starting to keep
track of the participants in EchoMail, and can more
than likely steer you to a person in your area who
is carrying the conference you are interested in.
Start by sending a note to your host requesting
information about the conference you care to join.
If he replies with a note referring you to a local
node, send them a message including your voice
number. It is much easier to set things up by voice
than by typing at each other. Eventually you will
get in contact with the local person, and make
arrangements. Later in this document we will talk
about the specifics of implementing EchoMail. We'll
leave it as being up to you and your EchoMail
contact to make arrangements about times, calls,
conferences, etc. Needless to say, this will vary
greatly depending on phone costs and the existing
method of distribution in your area.
If you cannot find a local connection, the
next step is to contact the EchoMail coordinator in
your region. These people are responsible for
maintaining information about EchoMail conferences
that cross regional boundaries. That means if you
are looking for a link into the 'basket weaving'
conference, and it is only carried in net 141,
you're on your own. Regional traffic is just that.
If it is a local conference, you will not get
information for linking in from the regional
EchoMail coordinator.
On the other hand, if the conference you are
looking for is national in scope, these people can
be of great assistance in locating a link point for
you. The person from the following list that you
should contact will depend on the region you are
in. If you are in region 13, don't call the person
in region 19.
=== REGIONAL ECHOMAIL COORDINATORS ===
Region Name Network Address
10 Butch Walker 161/1
11 Don Walker 120/20
12 Pacific Not Assigned Contact Jon Sabol
13 Gee Wong 107/312
14 Alex Hartley 100/500
15 David Dodell 114/15
16 Bob Hartman 132/101
17 Randy Bush 122/6
18 Wes Cowley 137/19
19 Jon Sabol 124/210
These people should be able to put you in
contact with someone who can feed you an Echo link.
Currently the Pacific region is unassigned as there
does not appear to be an Echo conference running
out there. This is a case where costs become
important. For someone in Hawaii to participate in
a national conference, they would have to make
overseas calls to get their mail. That would become
quite expensive.
Last, but not least, you can try someone who's
name you see in an existing conference. If, and
only if the above methods do not work, try
contacting someone who is geographically close to
you and is participating in the conference. Usually
they can at least steer you to someone else who
might be able to tie you into the area.
=== OPERATIONAL OVERVIEW ===
EchoMail operation is fairly complex and
requires a considerable amount of processing time
outside of the regular mail times. It is not
automatic. You must set up a series of external
events to run the EchoMail programs, and process
your incoming and outgoing mail. This WILL take
some time away from your normal BBS operations, but
will provide your users with a much nicer set of
message areas. Besides, most of the processing
takes place in the wee hours of the morning, and
caller activity is low then anyway.
Echo works by moving mail back and forth
between your mail area, and the message bases you
specify to be EchoMail areas. This is done using a
control file called 'AREAS.BBS'. It must reside in
your Fido root directory, and consists of the
following format:
(line 1) <Board Name> ! <Sysop's Name>
Board name is the name you want to appear
in the seenby line of each message
originating on your board.
! is a delimiter and is required.
Sysop's name is the name to be
substituted in messages from the sysop on
your board.
(line 2) <AREA_NUMBER> <AREA_TAG> <NODELIST>
AREA_NUMBER is the Fido messagebase
number that you want to use for the Echo
area.
AREA_TAG is the name that the message
base uses to keep it seperate from other
Echo traffic.
NODELIST is a list of net/node numbers
that you have made arrangements to share
messages with. DO NOT ARBITRARILY ADD
NODES TO THIS LIST!!!
This repeats for each area you are
participating in.
There are basically two programs that comprise
the heart of EchoMail:
TOSSMAIL moves incoming mail into the
appropriate message bases.
SCANMAIL moves mail entered on your board
into the netmail area to be sent
to other boards.
Scanmail is run right after a mail event to
move messages out of the mail area, and into the
area you have chosen to hold a conference. Tossmail
is run right before a mail event to move messages
originating on your board into the mail area to be
sent to the other participating nodes. This is the
simplest method of implementing EchoMail, it is not
the most efficient. Fido is extremely slow in
packetting and unpacketting mail. This will result
in an extreme degredation of the system. You can
expect a delay of approximately 1 minute per 10
messages of outgoing mail, and 1 minute per 25
messages incoming mail using Fido to packet and de-
packet EchoMail. This is significant since most of
the national conferences average about 40 messages
per day.
However, Thom Henderson has provided us with a
utility that packets mail without Fido. It is
called ARCmail, and will dramatically improve the
speed of your pre and post mail events. This
utility reads all the messages to a node, and
creates a file that can be transmitted instead of
the messages themselves. This means that whether
you are sending one or a hundred messages, you
still only use Fido to packet one message. ARCmail
runs approximately 75 percent faster than Fido for
packetting mail.
There are several other EchoMail utilities
that can make life a little easier. KILLDUPES is a
fast program that goes through a message base and
deletes messages that have the same From, To, Date,
and Subject fields. This is the biggest problem
with EchoMail. If it is not implemented right, you
end up spending someone else's money to send repeat
messages. Killdupes somewhat solves this problem.
TidyMail goes through a message base and does
some similar things. In addition, it can sort your
message base chronologically if you so desire. This
is a matter of personal taste. Some people like it,
others don't.
Seenby is a very important utility if you ever
add anyone to your distribution list. It goes
through and marks a message base as having been
sent already to a group of nodes. If you add
someone to a message base that has 300 messages in
it, you don't want to send them all out. You want
to let that person start at the current message
number in that area. Seenby makes this easy.
=== SUMMARY AND INFORMATION ===
This concludes this brief summary of EchoMail.
If you have not captured this entire document, you
can download it in area one under the name of
ECHTUTOR.DOC. More thorough information is
available in the documentation for EchoMail. This
is an overview to help you decide if you want to
start EchoMail on your system. I hope this has
helped, if not you can contact:
Jon Sabol National EchoMail Help
Fido 124/210
214/380-9063 (data)
214/380-2474 (voice)