Subject: Telecom Archives Email Service Now Operating
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 93 23:07:42 EDT
From: TELECOM Moderator <telecom@eecs.nwu.edu>


Well, it has been awhile in coming, and for the past couple days I have
been tearing my hair out trying to make the program work corectly, but
now it appears things are okay. You can beta-test it, and report any
problems which come to your attention.

Announcing the 'official' Telecom Archives Email Service. This script
has been installed right at the archives itself for the purpose of
obtaining files from the archives by email. It is especially intended
for users with UUCP/other access, but it works perfectly fine for 
Internet users as well. A simple set of commands is used, many of
which have arguments following which would typically be file names.

Here is how to use it:

1. Send email to tel-archives@lcs.mit.edu.

2. The subject does not matter.

3. In the text (for starters, there are other commands you can use)
   you *must* begin with your first command as:

   REPLY yourname@site     It is essential this comes first.

   Then other suggested commands on your first use are:

   HELP
   INFO INFO   (INFO takes an argument, give INFO again as argument).
   INDEX
   END

4. Mail it. You should get back at REPLY ADDRESS three separate mail
   items, one being a help file, one being detailed documentation on
   the INFO command (INFO has several arguments it can take), and the
   third being the most recent mirror of the Telecom Archives directory.

   The command END is required so that .signatures and other stuff
   don't get picked up and possibly mis-interpreted. 

   Watch for mail from "Telecom Archives via Email" with your files.

5. Other commands you can use will be explained in detail in the help 
   file including SEND <filename>.

6. Unfortunatly, the compressed files ending in .Z *cannot* be
   successfully transferred using this service. For those you still
   need to use FTP in binary mode, or a similar program.

I hope this new service will be useful to you. I wish to give special
thanks to Clive Feather <clive@x.co.uk> for providing the scripts I
am using to operate this service, and hope if you find it useful you
will drop him a note of thanks. 

Thanks also go to chrisb@lcs.mit.edu for making the necessary tweaks
to minktaka.lcs.mit.edu to accomdate this service, and as always to
management at lcs.mit.edu and MIT itself for providing the storage 
space for the Telecom Archives for several years now.

Try it, enjoy it, and let me know of any problems you encounter.


Patrick Townson
TELECOM Digest Moderator