Updated: 02/22/20 01:35 PM

Please peruse this file for answers to your questions! But if you don't see it, just ask! Brad.Friedman@cville.com

Q: I receive an "Invalid Property Error" when trying to access any of the other tabs besides the 'Program Setup' tab in PowrMAIL?

A: This error could occur if you are a new PowrMAIL user and you have not yet setup your Private Internet Mail forum in PBBS Config. Set that up first in PBBS, and then run PowrMAIL and the problem should be cleared up. You may want to delete the POWRMAIL.INI file before again running PowrMAIL just to make sure you get a fresh start.

Q: How can I be the first to try out new PowrMAIL updates and brand new Add-Ons?

A: Just join the PMBeta group! All are welcome! To do so, just write to MailList@winpoint.com and in the body of the note write:

JOIN PMBETA Whatever.Address@yourdomain.com

You can use a special address if you wish to make a "Virtual Newsgroup" in PowrMAIL for this mailing list, but please keep it a Private Forum! We'll see ya there!

Q: I would like to switch from WinNET's POP3 account to my local ISP. What are some of the things that I should look out for?

A: You need to ask your ISP for a 'domain POP' account. Different ISP's may call it differently but what such an account will do is to store all mail sent to your domain name in the same mailbox, independent of what is infront of the '@' sign.

You will also have to have your domain changed so that it points to your ISP's mail server(s). It is probably easiest to have your ISP take care of that since they will probably be running your domain name on their DNS servers and they should have the information needed for that.

Q: PowrMAIL's Import seems to be hanging. The PMImport Icon is minimized, but doesn't seem to be doing anything?

A: If you are having an error during PM Import, it's likely a bad piece of Mail or News. Try moving out (so we can look at them later if needed!) each of the oldest messages in your ..\x and ..\d directories (if \wnmail is on your system, those sub-directories will be in \wnmail\spool\witchcrf.. otherwise they will be in the PowrMAIL directory under \PMSMail\incoming..).

Move out the oldest file in each of those directories one at a time and then IMPORT again until it runs fine. When you've identified the bad piece of Mail (there is two files for each piece of mail, one in ..\x and one in ..\d) zip 'em up and send 'em to RonnyB@winpoint.com so we can add protection to PM's Import routine against such a piece of mail causing the same problem in the future. 

Q: My modem reports "No Dialtone" when running PMServer as an Event from PBBS.

A: There has been a good deal of discussion on this topic in the PM discussion group from those folks who - for some reason - have modems that don't go back On Hook when the modem initializes via DUN. Several possible solutions have been discussed and the one that makes the most sense to me as of now is to try taking advantage of the "Advanced" field you'll find in your Modem setup in Win95.

Find the Modem via Control Panel, choose Properties button, then Connection tab, then "Advanced" button.

You should see an "Extra Commands" field, in which you may try and put a hang up string such as ATH0 or ATZ or AT&F1 or whatever it might be that will make your modem hang up. You can also add ~ characters to modem strings usually to signify a short pause.

Sometimes one or more of those in a row will give the modem time it may need to return an OKAY from the command just given it. As in "ATH0~~~" or something along those lines.

A: There is a dial modifier available for many modems which will wait for the dial tone BEFORE dialing which can be used by many modems. I have an OPTIMA 288 by Hayes but the following procedure WILL work with US Robotics, Supra, LaSat and MultiTech Modems as well (according to the book which comes with the modems).

In the "Extra Settings" field described above enter the following:

ATDTW or ATDPW

 Use ATDTW if you have Touch-Tone Dialing or Use ATDPW if you use rotary pulse dialing.

The key is the W dial modifier. It is described (somewhat cryptically) as "wait for 2nd dial tone".in some books or Linked to S6 register. What this actually does is to keep your modem from dialing "like a mad man" until the dial tone comes on line. Then it dials your ISP and everything works like it should. Thenode will also operate properly for your users and you will also be able to select the choice of Keeping it OFF-Line if you choose.

So far the above has been tested and seems to work with success on a Hayes Optima 288 v34, Zoom 28.8/33.6, LaSat Safire 288v, Supra 33.6 and USR Sportster 14.4

Q: Where can I find a good free public newsgroup server?

A: Try "World of The Freeloader" at http://www.cyberlinkz.com for a list of free newsgroup servers.

A: There are several free public news servers listed at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/5336/server-nntp.htm

A: news.dma.be has proven to be reliable for some PMServer users. It's located at a college in the country of INDIA but they carry thousands of newsgroups, so it seems to have most anything you may be looking for.

Q: Why are messages not wrapping properly in PBBS's ANSI interface?

A: PowerBBS should be handling the wrapping properly since the messages may be displayed in several different ways (ANSI, PA, after QWK download in a QWK reader, PowerEdit etc.).

However, there is an undocumented option that can be used to do a reformating of the mail if you find a need to do so 

[PowrMAIL Info]

ReformatBadFormat=1

MaxLineLength=65

The [PowrMAIL Info] section is in the PowrMAIL.INI file. The default for ReformatBadFormat is 0 (no reformat) but changing it to 1 and setting the MaxLineLength to a reasonable number. The limit in PBBS ANSI has changed, but somewhere between 62 and 70 should fit fine on a line in the PBBS ANSI screen.

Q: Does Receiving Mail in PMServer with "TriggerSMTP" still require that a Mail eXchange (MX) record be setup with the ISP?

A: Yes and no, (don't you love those answers?). If the ISP's SMTP server is always used to spool the mail (that is, you only connect at certain time intervals, send the "Trigger" and get the waiting mail), you don't need an MX pointing to you. However, the ISP must have a MX record, for your domain, pointing to his SMTP server of course. The trigg message contains the domain name and the SMTP server is then setup to send the messages to a specific IP address.

If the ISP's SMTP server is just setup as a backup, which works in a very similar way, except that there should be two MX records, one pointing at the ISP server and one, with a higher priority, pointing to your PMSserver. In this case PMServer would be running "Full Time", with a full time connection. This would result in the PMServer receiving the mail normally, if PMServer or the connection goes down the ISP server will receive the mail and store it until PMServer comes back on-line. Normally the ISP's server will retry sending the messages every so often, so in this case there is normally no need to send the trigger.

Q: How can I use Eudora or MS Internet Mail etc. with PMServer and DPPP?

A: If you run PMServer, DPPP callers can send mail using Internet software, but not receive mail that way. Specify 10.0.2.2 as the SMTP Server in the Internet Mailer and DPPP will route it appropriately for sending. The user must still use PA/Net - at this time - to Receive mail however. Other options are currently being looked at, so contact PMServer Developer, Brad.Friedman@cville.com or DPPP Developer, Det@Goliath.de to see if there is any other news about this.

Q: I am having problems Forwarding mail with Viking, PowerViking and PowrMAIL Server on Windows NT?

A: (Info submitted by MazeMaster@mazebbs.win.net)
I just wanted to let others know about a problem I solved on my system where PowrMAIL would forward users mail to Viking at a address of lets say your.name@127.0.0.1 but would not reach its destination.

Everything functioned ok under Win95 until I switched over to WinNT. My fix was to set PowrMAIL to send out mail straight to recipients address thereby allowing Viking's smtp protocol to sort out the addresses rather than your providers smtp which would never acknowledge the address of 127.0.0.1

Now Viking's smtp will recognize 127.0.0.1 thereby placing the forwarded mail from PowrMAIL into your locally created users mailbox.

Q: When trying to log onto WinNET's POP server with PMServer, I receive "Error 629" reported by PMServer?

A: Error 629 means that the other side (win.net) disconnected. This may be a password problem, check if your password contains non-alpha characters, for example quote character (" or '), period (.), plus signs (+) or hyphens (-) or similar characters. In that case you have an old style password that doesn't work with WinNET's PPP dialup, nor does it work with their POP server. You will in that case have to contact Help@win.net and have them change the password to the type that will allow dialin PPP connection and access to the POP server. Many the original testers who had their accounts at WinNET for a while, had to have their password changed to deal with this newer format at WinNET.

A: Another solution may be in the settings for the Win95 Dial up Network settings. Right click on the ISP icon, click properties, click server type. Look for allowed network protocols: Make sure that NetBEUI & IPX/SPX Compatible are NOT checked. If they are, uncheck them and you may be able to get rid of the error.

Q: I use POP3 to Receive Mail with PMServer, but several of my users who are subscribed to the same Mailing List do not correctly receive mail from that list! The mail comes in, but is not delivered to the users addressess. Why?

A: This is a typical example of problems with some (actually, most)listservers and POP3 mail, no actual destination address in the header. POP3 does not have any information in the protocol about who the message is actually sent to, only the header information is available to the client, in this case, PowrMAIL.

PowrMAIL tries to resolve the address of the person the message is sent to using several parts of the header. First it checks the To:, second it tries the Cc: if it is present. It also looks for some special lines, like Apparently-To: which would be added by some mail servers when the message is sent to a Domain POP account and a special entry that is added by some list servers, X-ListMember:.

PMServer itself also looks for an entry on the first 'Received'line that many servers add, for example the WinNet servers *used* to add this entry but it looks like they do not for all messages.

That line contains the real address that the message is sent to in *most* cases, however with some lists it doesn't contain the true address, instead it contains the address of the list.

To solve the problem the mail server needs to add the true destination address as an Apparently-To: line. The mail server, receives the message using SMTP, which, as part of the SMTP protocol receives the true destination address and can easily insert that extra header information into the message but both we have been trying to get that information added for the many PBBS users using WinNET as their server. Unfortunately, as of this writing, it seems like either WinNet doesn't know how to do it or they simply feel that it is too much work.

This is not a problem when PMServer is used in SMTP receive mode since it then will receive the message with the SMTP protocol which, as mentioned, has the needed information as part of the protocol. Please see the APPAR-TO.TXT file included with PMServer's installation for specific details you can pass along to your ISP to help resolve the situation.

Q: Any hints on using Wildcards in KILL records?

A: The 'Incoming Mail To:' is set to either a specific name on your BBS as the actual name (that is, the name as it is after the import, e.g., John Doe, not John_Doe@whatever.com) or has just a wildcard * to kill independent of who it is addressed to. You can also use something like John* to delete mail addressed to all whos first part of the name is John.

Then for the 'Do Not Import' part, if you check the 'From Address' you would enter the 'From' address as the criteria. This however is the internet address of the sender, e.g., john.doe@someother.com you can use wild card here as well, e.g., *@savetrees.com, which would kill the message if the 'Incoming Mail To' match and if the message is sent from anybody that uses the savetrees.com domain.

If you use the 'Subject line of...' option you would instead type the subject line of messages you would like to kill. Note that the subject must be an exact match unless you add wildcards to it. For example, to kill all messages that match the 'Incoming Mail To' and has a subject line of 'How to make fast money' you could make the subject line entry in the kill record '*fast*money*' (without the quotes), which would kill any message that has the two words 'fast' and 'money' in the subject line, e.g., 'I made faster money using this method'. Without the wildcard in the begining the word 'fast' must be the first word in the subject line, likewise, without the last wildcard the word 'money' must be the last word in the subject line. The middle wild card makes the word 'fast' match both 'fast' and 'faster' for example, as well as match if the two words doesn't follow each other directly, e.g., 'This is a fast way to make money'.

Using the 'With File Attachments named...' is relatively straight forward, you may use wildcards here as well, e.g., '*.exe' to delete messages that has any .EXE file attached. 

Finally, the 'With Body Text containing...' option works the same way as the subject line function, that is, you could use the same '*fast*money*' to kill all messages containing the words 'fast' and 'money' anywhere in the body. However, the order of the two words are significant, the above example would not match

'Make money fast'. This is also true for the subject line funtion. Also, avoid to use too many 'With Body Text contining...' records, unlike the other options this option has to load and scan through the whole message.

All the matching is done case-insensitive so it doesn't matter how you type in the match text.

The important thing to remember is that the 'Incoming Mail To' must match the name the message is sent to, possibly with wildcards, before the 'Do Not Import' part is tested.

The wildcards you can use is '*' and '?'. The '?' match a single character, e.g., 'ma?e' would match 'make', 'made', 'male' and so on, while '*' matches any number of characters as in the '*fast*money*' example above.

- I haven't used wingate but I did some time ago (a long time ago to be exact)read the docs for it.

If I remember correctly you had to set it up by telling it which TCP/IP ports it uses. The ports used are:

SMTP (for sending mail) port 25
POP3 (for receiving mail) port 110
NNTP (for sending/receiving mail) 119

It is also using the UDP protocol on port 53 for the DNS lookup but I would think that this port is enabled by default since that is the one used by all DNS lookup. The others are the standard ports for SMTP/POP3/NNTP as well so they too may be setup already as default in wingate.

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If you are using a utility such as wingate to connect more than one computer to the Internet, and you wish to run PMServer on a computer that is not directly connected to the Internet you should enter the LAN IP address of the gateway computer for the server addresses in PMServer configuration (i.e. 192.168.0.1) instead of the actual name of the computer on the LAN..

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- Added option to allow the header of received mail to be scanned for additional TO: and CC: addresses. To enable this function add the following to the POWRMAIL.INI under the [PowrMAIL Info] section:

UseXfileAddressOnly=0

Default is 1 which makes PowrMAIL only look for the destination names in the X control file for the message.

Note however that this can give unexpected results depending on the mailer used to send the message and the mailserver(s) and UUCP system that the message pass.

According to the RFC's about SMTP mail a mailer (or other servers) should whenever possible send a mail message with multiple destinations within the same domain as a single message. In the SMTP protocol should be given all the destination e-mail addresses for this single message to reduce the amount of data sent.

However, not all mailers does this, some mailers sends several copies of the message even though the destination is for multiple email addresses within the same domain.

The same is true for the UUCP systems that receives the messages for delivery to their clients. Some systems includes the same message several times, each with a different X-file for each e-mail address (which is an acceptable way), some sends only one message but have multiple e-mail addresses in the X-file (which is the most 'correct' way) and some sends only a single message with only one e-mail address in the X-file. 

As a result, both depending on the mailer used to send the message and the mail servers / UUCP system the message pass through, you may get multiple copies of the same message. Assume that a person sends a message to three people on your system, using a mailer that sends to each of the three addresses as a separate message. With the above option set to 0 each of the three messages will than be scanned and imported to the three e-mail addresses with the result that each of these people get three copies of the same message.

If the mailer correctly sends only one message but some server or the UUCP system sends it to you as three different messages, each with a different X-file with the three addresses, again the three email addresses will receive three copies of the same message. 

Only in the case where the mailer sends a single message and the UUCP system sends a single message with a single X-file, containing only one of the e-mail addresses will this option work correctly.

=============================
DOCUMENT:Q138012 07-FEB-1997 [win95x]
TITLE :Incorrect Settings for File System Performance Profiles
PRODUCT :Microsoft Windows 95.x Retail Product
PROD/VER:95
OPER/SYS:WINDOWS
KEYWORDS:kbenv kbsetup
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The information in this article applies to:
- Microsoft Windows 95
- Microsoft Windows 95 OEM Service Release version 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------

IMPORTANT: This article contains information about editing the registry. Before you edit the registry, you should first make a backup copy of the registry files (System.dat and User.dat). Both are hidden files in the Windows folder.

SYMPTOMS
========
The performance of the file system on your computer is unchanged or degraded after you select Network Server or Mobile Or Docking System in the Typical Role Of This Machine box in the File System Properties dialog box.

CAUSE
=====
The NameCache and PathCache values are written to the registry incorrectly for the Network Server and Mobile Or Docking System profiles. The data for NameCache is written to the PathCache value, and the data for PathCache is written to the NameCache value.

RESOLUTION
==========
NOTE: For information about how to edit the registry, view the Changing Keys And Values online Help topic in Registry Editor (Regedit.exe). Note that you should make a backup copy of the registry files (System.dat and User.dat) before you edit the registry. 

WARNING: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall Windows 95. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved.

Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

Modify the NameCache and PathCache values in the following registry key:
Hkey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\FSTemplates

NOTE: The value data for these settings is in hexadecimal format.
For the Mobile Or Docking System profile, use the following data:

Value name Value data
------------------------
NameCache 51 01 00 00
PathCache 10 00 00 00

For the Network Server profile, use the following data:
Value name Value data
------------------------
NameCache a9 0a 00 00
PathCache 40 00 00 00

STATUS
====== 
Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Windows 95 OEM Service Release version 1. This problem has been corrected in Windows 95 OEM Service Release version 2.

MORE INFORMATION
================
After you modify the registry settings, use the following procedure to optimize your file system performance:

1. In Control Panel, double-click the System icon.
2. On the Performance tab, click File System.
3. In the Typical Role Of This Machine box, click the most common role for your computer, and then click OK.

The default profile (Desktop Computer) does not use the NameCache or PathCache values in the registry. Instead, the file system defaults are used.

NOTE: The profile values for NameCache and PathCache listed in the "Microsoft Windows 95 Resource Kit" (page 566) are correct; however, they are listed in decimal format. For the Desktop Computer profile, the default value for NameCache is a5 02 00 00, and the default value for PathCache is 20 00 00 00.

REFERENCES
==========
For additional information about optimizing file system performance, please see the "Microsoft Windows 95 Resource Kit," pages 565-567, "Optimizing File System Performance with Profiles." 

KBCategory: kbenv kbsetup
KBSubcategory: win95 diskmem
Additional reference words: 95 osr osr1

=============================================================================

THE INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THE MICROSOFT KNOWLEDGE BASE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. MICROSOFT DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL MICROSOFT CORPORATION OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF MICROSOFT CORPORATION OR ITS SUPPLIERS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. SOME STATES DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF LIABILITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES SO THE FOREGOING LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY.

Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1997.

Still haven't found the answer? Okay, let's have it! Brad.Friedman@cville.com