One of the main goals of the Co Team, especially Steve Sears, was to develop a method of passing WME via the Internet. Well, step one of this goal has been achieved. If you already have (or soon will) and Internet Email account, you will soon be able to receive WME QWK packs without ever making a LD phone call.
The best thing about this is that you do not require any special programs.Your standard E-Mail reader, in most cases will be all you need to receive your mail (you will of course need the normal utilities to import it into your BBS) The only possible edition would be a UUENCODE/UUDECODE utility, and there are many free ones out there.
So, how does this work. It is very simple. Each morning, WME Host will run a utility on the host machine that will make a QWK packet for you. It will then be sent to you encoded and attached to an E-Mail Message. You simply need to change the name of the file and import it into your BBS.
When you are ready to reply, you will export your REP from your BBS and change its name to your last name.rep. Attach it to an Email message addressed to the current WME address
The WME host BBS will pick these up, decode them, and toss the messages into the BBS.
The entire process is to be soon fully automated, and backups of everything are saved on the outside chance of problems.
For those curious on the programs used to do this, several have been used in the past. A few are Intermail, (a front end mailer) GIGO (a utility to convert FIDO messages into a format that Unix will understand), FXUUCICO (a uucp communications program) To actually send and receive the mail), TriToss, Tridog, TriBBS (Trisoft products) UUDEVIEW,(a uucode program) and some creative batch files. So far, it seems to be working very well.
Steve Sears would like to thank the following people for the great help they have given him in setting this all up. In no special order -- Greg Murrell, Jim Bennett, Doug Munson, Joe Klemmer, Mark Goodwin, Richard Cycholl, and Patrick Driscoll. (I hope I did not forget anyone, if I did, I'm very sorry) Without the help of these folks, this project may have never made it off the ground.
If you are interested in getting WME via this method, Please, drop me a line,I will send you all the information you need, and we can start the process. At this moment WME is looking for some FTP space, the space that Steve so generously donated has unfortunately come to en end as of this writing, and WME is now on hold as far as Internet<>EMAIL<>QWK transfer is concerned but are in the hopes of soon being back on track!
If you have any questions concerning this method of ECHO NET mail transfer feel free to contact WME