This AUP is a minor revision mostly in the email system. It contains several minor bug fixes in wcSMTP, wcMAIL and wcListServer. wcStart has been improved and has some new features.
COMING SOON! Wildcat! News Server!
There is a new checkbox option in the Mail Conference Settings called "Publish as Local Newsgroup". Ignore this checkbox option for now. It will be used for the new product called "Wildcat! News Server" which is currently under beta-testing. The Wildcat! News Server will be a free add-on product to all customers currently subscribed under the AUP.
wcCONFIG:
- New options in Mail Conferences Setup:
General Tab: Conference Mail Policy: 2 new options
Days to Keep External User Mail (days): _7_
[ ] Delete External user mail once delivered by SMTP
Description:
The Wildcat! mail server always had a hardcoded 7 days limit for
external mail. External mail is email addressed to someone outside
your system. The recepient is not local or part of your system.
During the mail packing process, Wildcat would expire the mail in 7
days. For large systems, waiting 7 days can quickly overload your
mail system when the mail was already sent. You now have the option
to change this 7 day value.
In addition, an option was added to the SMTP mail sender which will
mark the message as sent when it successfully sends the mail. If this
checkbox is checked (enabled), the mail packer will immediately delete
the message not wait until it expires in 7 days.
After you upgrade to this new version and restart wcServer, it will
automatically preset External Mail Expiration days to 7 so that it
behaves as before when the value was hardcoded. You will see a one
time log entry in Wildcat.log saying "+ Auto Updating Conference:" to
set the default values.
Please note this new "immediate delete" option is for external mail
only not local mail. If you use this option, you will run a less
stress mail system. However, it can surprise users who may want
to go back an read a message and find its not there anymore because
it was sent and deleted.
Settings Tab: Toggle Settings, 1 new option
[ ] Publish as Local Newsgroup
Description:
Ignore this checkbox option for now. It will be used for the new
product called "Wildcat! News Server" which is currently under
beta-testing. The Wildcat! News Server will be a free add-on product
to all customers currently subscribed under the AUP.
wcFTP:
- Fixed idle time out problem where it was not disconnecting the socket connection (dropping the idle ftp user).
wcSMTP:
- Fixed a mite where email headers were using tabs as RFC header
field delimiter and wildcat was not seeing it. This might address
some situations where expected mail with attachments is imported
without attachments.
- Added a Server Up Event to support the new wcStart optional Up Event
signal watcher. The Up Event string is: "Wildcat.SmtpUpEvent". Please
note that this is case sensitive and must be spelled like this when
used in wcStart for launching wcSMTP.
- Fixed some RFC date formatting mites (carried over to wc6 as well).
- Added logic to improve the server email packing process for systems
with large amounts of non-local user outbound messages.
- Fixed a problem where the optional MAPS RBL host site was not honored
by wcSMTP.
- Added a new command line switch option to disable or enable the RFC
recommendation of trying atleast once a bad email address or one which
does not have a MX record (mail exchange post office).
The RFC recommends that a standard SMTP mail sender try all the mx
records reported by DNS for the email domain address. If no mx records
are found, then try the email domain address atleast once. If this
fails, bounce it immediately.
This RFC recommendation was programmed into wcSMTP in earlier
versions. However, Santronics relaxed the logic in subsequent updates
due to customer reports who have domain names with temporarily down
times. So wcSMTP was relaxed to follow the normal mail retry options
defined in wcCONFIG SMTP setup which by default is 72 attempts (once
per hour) before a bounce message is sent.
But some customers with more reliable 24x7 operations want a more
immediate bounce response especially in situations where the email
address simply had a typo. As one Wildcat! administrator at a company
said: "Our boss didn't want to wait 3 days to find out he had a typo!"
So the following new command line options will enable or disable the
RFC recommendation of "No MX, Try once" logic in wcSMTP
/nomx- No MX refound, follow the Retry limits (default)
/nomx+ No MX found, Try once
wcMAIL:
- Fixed a mite where email headers were using tabs as RFC header field delimiter and wildcat was not seeing it. This might address some situations where expected mail with attachments is imported without attachments.
wcSTART:
- The menu "Add wcOnline" option was removed and replaced with a more
generic system of adding applications to the starting logic. A text
file called "startapp.txt" is now available which will provide
some examples of basic (and ideal) startup order for common Wildcat
applications. 3rd party applications can add their own section to this
file to support customers wanting to add their start logic to wcStart.
- New options for each process properties:
[ ] Wait for completion
If this option is checked, wcStart will load/start the
application and wait until it is finished before continuing to
the next start process. This is useful for operations where a
program is required to be loaded to perform some necessary
initialization and then exits prior to doing anything else.
The program does not need to stay running.
Note: This will not work with batch files. Only 32 bit
applications. To use a batch file, make the program:
program: c:\winnt\cmd.exe << For NT
program: c:\windows\command.exe << For 95/98
arguments: /C yourbatch.cmd
The /C is very important otherwise it will never return back to
wcStart.
Optional Up Event Signal: ______________________________________
The Up Event Signal is a special Win32 Event Handle that wcStart
will watch for to signify a successful process startup. This
will only work for applications which support an Up Event signal.
WcOnline has an Up Event signal called "Wildcat.OnlineUpEvent".
THIS IS CASE SENSITIVE. If defined, wcStart will wait for this
signal from wcOnline before continuing.
For 3rd Party Authors:
3rd party authors can augment their successful integration with
WINServer's wcStart logic by adding their own up event signal.
This is very easy to do by using the Win32 CreateEvent() api
function. This is an example of how wcOnline creates this event
signal:
// This is done in WcOnline start/main program logic when
// everything pertaining to wcOnline has been initialized.
Event = CreateEvent(NULL, TRUE, TRUE, "Wildcat.OnlineUpEvent");
// This is done in WcOnline close/exit logic:
CloseHandle(Event);
Note: The named event is case sensitive.
wcNEWS:
- Made it so that /host does not use the wcnews.cfg info
(ie. authinfo stuff)
- Added new command line switches:
/auth:username /pwd:password
With these new switches, for sysops who are connecting to multiple
news host and are using a copy wcnews.cfg logic, do not need to have
multiple wcnews.cfg anymore. They can do something like this in
their news events.
wcnews /host:newshost1
wcnews /host:newshost2 /auth:userid /pwd:password
wcnews /host:newshost3
If you begin to use these method, you need to do one thing first:
Copy/merge all the various newsgroups low=,high= lines in the *.cfg
files into the single wcnews.cfg files.
wcLISTSERVE:
- Fixed RFC Received line date problem in exporting of mail.
- Improved the logging of wcListServer operations. New option to use
Daily Logging (default is TRUE). To turn off, use the /dlog- command
line option.
- There were problems with running wcListServe and setup at the same
time. We are aware of the database sharing problems and we plan to
make it possible to use setup at the same time. However, in the mean
time, there were problems when people didn't realize this. So this
version will not allow either program run at the same time. It will
display a popup message. Once again, this is a temporary solution to
prevent people from running setup while the wclistserver is running.
We will have a true database solution in the near future.
- Added a Server Up Event to support the new wcStart optional Up Event
signal watcher. The Up Event string is: "Wildcat.ListServeUpEvent".
Please note that this is case sensitive and must be spelled like this
when used in wcStart for launching wcListServe.
- When deleting a list with wcListServe Setup.exe, the members were
not deleted. Now, they are deleted when you delete a list.
- Added a Digest Age option to Digest List forums. Use the following
table to adjust your digest processing:
wcListServer Digest Processing Logic:
List Digest Setup
Total Msgs Digest Age Digest Processing Logic
---------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------
N > 0 0 Wait until N msgs. No time limit.
---------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------
N > 0 Age > 0 Wait until N msgs or when Age is reached.
Send all pending msgs. Since N wasn't
reached, the digest will natually have less
than N msgs.
---------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------
N = 0 Age > 0 Wait until Age is reached, send all pending
msgs.
---------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------
N = 0 Age = 0 Wait until midnight, send all pending msgs.
---------- ---------- ----------------------------------------------
END OF CHANGE HISTORY