Re: Those that call the Apple 2 BBS

[Chris Morse <chris@sorry.no.spam.com>]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 02:17:19 -0700, "Terry Olsen"
<tolsen64@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Forgot to ask:  what about email?  Two possibilities:
>
>Local email accounts that can send and receive locally & internet.  Or an
>email system that sends to the recipient's registered email address.  Not
>revealed to the sender tho.  But then...what do you use for a "ReplyTo"?
>Unless...email that comes in for user@mybbs.com gets relayed to the user's
>registered email address.  I wrote an SMTP server that handles incoming
>email only in VB6.  I used my ISP's outgoing SMTP server for sending.  I
>never did figure out how the SMTP server knew where to connect to send a
>particular piece of mail.

Haven't worked on email yet.  I deliver e-mail by breaking out the
email address to get the domain name, doing a DNS lookup on the domain
name for MX records and then delivering directly to their mail
exchange.  This eliminates the need for an SMTP server to relay the
mail.

I could extend the server for handling plugin modules (DLL's), where
each plugin would run as a background thread, so you could add in the
functionality you wanted (SMTP server, POP3 server, FTP server, NNTP
server, whatever.)  But then again, these could work equally as well
as stand-alone apps, since ultimately they would just be talking to
the database.

I'm wondering right now about ANSI support.. right now, it's straight
ASCII text.. But for the multi-user chat, I would like to have a
"split" interface using ANSI or VT100 control codes to control cursor
position, etc.  Not sure what sort of terminal emulation is common
with Apple II comm programs, should they ever be used with the BBS
through some Serial/telnet gateway setup.

I think that for now, when I create the BBS mail system, I will just
have a user option to forward email to an internet mail account.  If
turned on, it would forward the mail, if off, it wouldn't.

It would be nice to get at least one online (multi-user) game going,
too.  But I'm not sure what that would be yet.

// CHRIS