Whap/Internet
29 messages in this thread
Does anyone use Whap in getting messages from Internet through CIS? Mine
chokes if more than one or two are left in my mailbox, which makes it
impossible to get the Imagine Mailing List easily. My "R" button is
highlighted, but apparently the message format confuses View.
Any ideas?
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
I get messages from Internet regularly and don't have any problem. I
usually don't get more than two at a time though.
-Sean
Sean,
So does that mean that you're using Whap with Internet OK? I've taken to
doing everything manually, which is a bummer when I'm used to Whap.
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
<<you're using Whap with Internet OK?>> Yes, I am. The deal is, you have
to have the person's address in the subject
-Sean
Karl,
Oops. Goofed on that one. The address of the person that you're
sending to has to be in the comments box in the View! address book. I
can't remember what the actual form is, but it's something like this:
Internet>'the person's address goes here'
I hope I've been of some help.
-Sean
Sean,
Thanks for the reply, but I'm having no trouble sending messages in the
way you describe. But lately, I can't receive them in batches, as Whap
chokes on some of them. It can often pick out a few it likes, but there's
something about the rest of them it doesn't like. I was just curious if
anyone else had seen this.
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
I guess I wouldn't be a really good person to compare with then, because
all the mail I get from Internet comes from one person and therefore one
address. Sorry I couldn't help more.
-Sean
Sean,
I appreciate the effort, nonetheless. The only time I get irritated is
when I post a question and no one even tries to answer. Luckily, this is
rare, and my first assumption is that it was stupid, and I go do some more
digging. It seems that Betty Clay has some direct experience with this, so
I'm in luck!
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
Glad to hear that Betty can help.
-Sean
from the Whap docs:
Add to Book … (Right-Amiga-A)
View! contains an Address Book feature. This is used for those
people you correspond with frequently. By selecting this menu item
the name and User ID of the person in the FROM: field of the
currently displayed message will be added to your Address Book. You
will then be presented with a string requester asking for you to
enter a comment for the Address Book entry. This comment can be up
to 80 characters long. When selecting the Add to Book menu item, if
the message is an Internet message, you will be prompted for the name
of the sender. The Internet address will automatically become the
comment. The Address Book will be described in greater detail later
in this document.
Originating CompuServe Mail Messages
With the INTERNET gadget selected, you may click on an Address Book entry
and have the name copied to the NAME: string gadget as before. If the
comment begins with >INTERNET: the comment field will be copied to the
User ID string gadget. If it does not begin with >INTERNET: an error
message and screen flash will be displayed.
Michael
…..on AutoPilot
Michael,
I have no trouble sending messages in the manner you describe and do it
frequently, sending messages to one person in particular on the Internet. I
started having problems RECEIVING Internet messages, however, when I joined
the Imagine mailing list and started getting 3 or more messages sent to me
in a day. View is unable to interpret all of them, yet picks out some as
being acceptable. It reports the remainder "have been skipped. Use an
editor to view them." Something in the Internet header is causing Whap
grief, but I don't know what. I'm beginning to suspect that maybe my
address in their header doesn't have the ">", but that's unconfirmed (and
doubtful).
I posted my original message in the hopes that people who got a lot of
Internet mail using Whap may have seen my problem. Apparently not.
Thanks for the reply,
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
Is this problem still bothering you this week? I had that kind of
problems for about two or three weeks with Internet messages, but it went
away a few days ago. I read on another forum that there had been some
problems with the CIS system having omitted something from the headers of
Internet mail, but that it has now been fixed.
Betty,
Yes, tonight there were 11 messages waiting for me, but Whap could only
load 6. After weeks of messages, I think I've finally figured it out.
In the second line of an Easyplex message, what follows the "From: "
seems very important to Whap. It seems that it must either be a name,
followed by some spaces and then ">INTERNET:<address>" or
">INTERNET:<address>". In all the messages that get hosed, the ">" is
missing from this line before "INTERNET:", whether after a regular name, or
instead of it. I don't know why the ">" is sometimes missing. It seems to
be a Compuserve irregularity, since the usual contact I have at a local
college normally comes through fine, while Internet mail is problematic.
BUT! Whap missed one from him today, and sure enough, the ">" was missing
for some reason. I went back through all the ".screwup" groups of messages
I've kept for the last few weeks, and this is the only thing consistent
about the errors. So I don't suspect Whap, I suspect some inconsistency in
Compuserve mail handling from Internet.
The only hole in this theory is if I'm the only one having trouble!
This is frustrating. I miss my effortless Whap mail-reading capability.
Thanks for the reply,
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
There was a discussion with some of the CIS personnel about this missing >
within the past two weeks. Lots of people were having problems with
Internet mail. My own problems seem to have stopped over the weekend and
during this week, so I thought it was fixed. I know that they have been
aware that there were some problems and were working on it. I'll ask
around and see if others are still having trouble.
That's wonderful Betty! It's nice to know I don't have some weird problem
all to myself.
Karl
– via Whap!
When problems like this occur, Karl, the best place to report them is to
HELPFORUM. I think you get better and faster answers there than you do
from FEEDBACK, and they are straight from the support people at CIS.
Also, HELPFORUM is free.
Thanks, Betty, I'll try that. At first, I thought it was an overly
sensitive Whap, so I started here.
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
You're not the only one with this problem. It's been happening to me
for several weeks now. (I thought I was getting garbage characters in the
bodies of my messages, so I didn't worry about it.) Today I downloaded 11
Internet EasyPlex messages, and View rejected 10 of them. After I read
your message here, I checked the headers of my 'Plexes, and I think you're
right about the cause. The From: line should have an ">INTERNET:" string in
it; if the ">" is missing, View rejects the messages.
I *think* that the problem stems from CIS' use of the ">" character.
The angle brackets have a rather specific use in Internet e-mail headers.
As I recall the RFCs, a DNS address must one of the following (there may be
one or two more):
(User's Real Name or other comment) user@site.domain
user@site.domain (User's Real Name or other commment)
User's Real Name <user@site.domain>
Note that the last form contains the angle brackets. I suspect that CIS'
use of the ">" in their DNS addressing is causing trouble. View! could
probably be a bit more forgiving about the format of the From: line. I
don't think it's fundamentally a View! problem, though. It looks more like
a design error on CompuServe's part.
–dds Whappeta-whappeta-Whap!
(dales@cryo.rain.com)
Dale,
Thanks for the confirmation. It was an empirical guess with complete
ignorance about message header format. Like, what's RFC and DNS? <grin>
Hopefully, you're suggestion of a more forgiving mail-reader will be
considered for the upcoming AutoPilot release!
But in the meantime, I need to act on Betty's suggestion and contact
HELPFORUM about it.
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
"Like, what's RFC and DNS? <grin>"
Oops! 🙂 Here and I was assuming (hah!) that since you were on the
Internet, you already knew the jargon! Sorry about that.
Anyway, DNS stands for Domain Name Service (or Server). A Domain
Name is an email address that obeys the Internet email protocols. The
Service/Server part comes from certain machines that are on the net which
will provide a kind of routing service. (I'm kinda fuzzy on that latter
part; the sites I've used have always used DNS addresses internally
already, so I've never had to use a DNS server.)
RFC stands for Request For Comment. An RFC is as close to an
official standard as the Internet gets. I think there's over 1500 of them
by now. They cover everything from the structure of the TCP/IP packets, to
the format of the headers of netnews and email messages. (Did you know
that if a news header is blank, that the last character is acutally a
space, not the colon? Yup. So instead of "Subject:", it's actually
"Subject: ". This sort of thing can cause trouble, and actually has in the
past.)
One of the tenets of netnews is "be forgiving in what you recieve,
and conservative in what you send". Hopefully, AutoPilot will be more
forgiving of some of the vaguaries of email headers (including
CompuServe's).
–dds Whappeta-whappeta-Whap!
Thanx!
I had the internet problem, too, but not it's fixed!
Sincerely, J"org
Kultur via Whap! (WARNING: Weird English)
Joerg,
Where are you located? I wonder if it's geographical? Nah.
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl:
You may want to check with Betty Clay on this… She gets a lot of
Internet mail, and I seem to recall that she ran in to a similar problem a
while back. I hope she can help.
Michael
…..on AutoPilot
I have once or twice experienced the problem you describe, but I couldn't
see what might have caused it. I saved the capture. Maybe I should look
it up.
Neil
Neil,
I'm now confident that I know what's happening, and others have
confirmed it. The ">" before "INTERNET:…" is stripped by Compuserve in
some cases, for some reason, and Whap can no longer consider it a
recognizable message. I've been manually going behind Whap's back, sticking
the ">"'s back in, and everything's fine. I've complained to HELPFORUM, but
have received no response as yet.
Thanks for the reply,
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
There WAS a response to your message over there, but it was not as helpful
as I had hoped. They just said that there had been a problem with this
very thing recently, but that they thought it had been cleared up. If you
are still having trouble, maybe you need to let them know that it is not
really fixed yet.
Oops. I was thinking it was a feedback kind of thing that would generate an
Email reply, but of course, now that I think of it, it WAS a regular forum
that I left a message into. I'll go over and "service" it properly, taking
care to maintain proper headers of course! <grin>
I've taken to first multitasking out of Whap after it's gotten my
Internet mail and inserting the ">" where necessary, then coming back and
using View to read, reply and keep. Annoying, but workable. I wish they'd
get it fixed. Did you say that you haven't had this happen recently?
Karl
– via Whap!
Karl,
It's been a week or two since I had a problem. There were quite a spell
of days, though, when every Internet message I got was a problem, and all
messages from the first Internet message on would be attached to each
other. I read on another forum that others were having trouble, and then
I read from a CIS official that it had been fixed – and I haven't had
problems since then.
Yes, Karl – DO be careful with those headers! 🙂
Well, I'm not feeling very hopeful so far. I've explained to two people
that yes, I still have the problem that they thought they fixed. I can't
Imagine that I'm the only one this is happening to, but I'm at a loss to
explain it. Irritating, though. Just to make VERY sure that it wasn't Whap,
I held it at bay until I used NComm to check the mail manually, and, sure
enough, the ">"'s were missing from today's mail as well. <sigh>
Karl
– via Whap!