










               H O W   2   P O L L   A U T O M A T I C A L L Y

                              Written by Lasher
                            [FiERCE Productions]







Ok, simple.  How to make your InterMail or FrontDoor setup poll other boards
for echomail.

One way of doing it is Forcing a Poll.  To do this, press ALT-F at the WFC
screen.  This will prompt you for a node address.  Put in the node address
for the bbs you want to poll.

  NOTE: You must have compiled a nodelist first.  This will only work if
        the board you want to poll is in a nodelist, the nodelist is placed
        in your nodelist directory (ie. c:\im\nodelist), and if you have
        compiled it using either [imnc /f] or [fdnc /f] for either
        software.

That's all there is to forcing a poll.  Now, to automate it.  This is easy too.
Go into your setup (either imsetup.exe or fdsetup.exe or use ALT-C at the WFC
screen) and go over to the MANAGER.  Next press enter on EVENTS and you will
be thrown into the event editor.  Next, insert an event.

You'll be asked a few things when you make a new event.  If you've never made
an event before, pay attention closely.  If you have, I don't know why the
hell you're reading this and don't know how to poll.

TAG         - Give this any letter of the alphabet except for X.  Use A if you
              don't have an A event defined.

DAYS        - Whatever days you want the event to be executed on.  If you
              wanted to poll a board twice a week, you might pick Sunday and
              Thursday.

MODIFIER    - This *must* be:  Ignore eventbase (*)

START TIME  - Whatever time you want the event to start at (generally for mail
              tossing, it would be sometime in the early morning like 2 or
              3 am, or whatever time your hub/host tells you to poll.

LENGTH      - The length of the event.  Set this to something like 10 minutes
              or 15 minutes (don't set it to one cuz if you get one busy signal
              from the board you're trying to poll, it won't poll again until
              the next time the event is defined or you force a poll).
              ie. 00:15

MIN. COST   - Set this to 0.  Don't ask why, just do it.

MAX. COST   - Set this to -1 to ignore the cost.

BEHAVIOUR   - We'll get to that in a sec...

USE ALIAS   - Set this to whatever alias you are polling.  Ie, for DaemonNet,
              you were to poll the host (38:666/0) and your DaemonNet address
              was 138:300/0.  If you also had a CipNet address (ie. 18:609/1)
              you would use your DaemonNet address here and not the CipNet
              address because you would be polling a DaemonNet host.

RETRY DELAY - Put it to 0.

COMMENT     - Put it to whatever you want (ie. Poll DaemonNet Host)


Ok, now we get into the Behaviour of the event.  I'll add comments to
everything so you understand why I'm telling you to do what I'm telling you to
do.

        Allow users during event                NO
                Set this to NO because if you don't and someone calls during
                this event and you have not yet sent/picked up your mail,
                you won't do it that night.  This prevents users from tying
                up the phone line.

        Exit when mail is received              YES
                Set to YES because this way GEcho and Renemail (or Obvmail or
                whatever mail scanner/tosser comes with your software) can do
                it's work as defined in the starting batch file.

        High priority (crash) mail only         NO
                Set this to no otherwise the only mail that will be sent is
                the mail flagged with the CRASH flag.  If it was flagged with
                CRASH, you wouldn't need this event to send it.

        Allow file requests                     YES
                Set to YES so that people can FREQ your system.

        Pickup file requests                    YES
                Set to YES so that you can pick up your FREQs.

        Hold (don't send) file requests         NO
                Set to NO so you can send FREQs to people.

        Hold (don't send) file attatches        NO
                Set to NO so that if you have attached a file to a message
                (and this includes the packets that ARCMail generates), they
                will be sent when you poll.  You *must* have this set to NO.

        Attempt to pickup waiting mail          YES
                Set to YES so that if there is mail waiting for you from your
                host or hub, your system will receive it.

        Allow nodes to pickup waiting mail      YES
                If a system decides to poll you during this event, they will
                get any mail that is addressed to them.  This is especially
                important if someone polls you.

        Send-only                               NO
                Set to NO so that your system will receive as well as send.

        Receive-only                            NO
                Set to NO so that your system will send as well as receive.

        End event when no more mail to send     YES or NO
                This setting depends entirely upon your system.  If you are a
                host or hub, or if someone polls you for mail, keep this at NO
                so that when you have no more mail to send, the event will
                still disallow users so that if someone happens to poll you
                they can still get through.  If you only poll someone for mail
                you may set this to YES because you won't be expecting anyone
                to poll you.

        Send to CM systems only                 NO
                This, if set to YES, will only poll systems that have the CM
                flag in their entry in the nodelist.  Some boards do not
                indicate that they accept mail at all times, and some will only
                accept mail in the wee hours, so set this to NO just to make
                sure you can send to *any* systems, no matter what their mail
                flags.

        Send to non-CM systems only             NO
                Same principle as above, keep this to NO.

        Only execute event once                 NO
                For something like daily maintenance, you can set this to YES,
                but when you are dealing with mail transfers, it just makes
                sense to keep this set to NO.  Just in case the event is missed
                for whatever reason.

        Inactive                                NO
                Set to YES only when you do not want the event to execute.


Now, for the last thing.  You have to edit your ROUTE.IM or ROUTE.FD file,
depending of course on what frontend mailer you are using.  It should,
basically, contain the following:

  Schedule @ All            ;(if you are using FD it will be * instead of All)
   HOLD [node address1]

  Schedule A All
   UNHOLD [node address1]
   POLL [node address1]

  ;end of file route.im

Ok, this is simple to explain.  The Schedule lines correspond with your event
tags.  The @ sign is the @ event which is always active.  Put in the HOLD
statement there and it will keep the mail held until you UNHOLD it with an
event (which is your polling event).

The "Schedule A" corresponds with the "A" event (the one we defined above).
You can poll multiple systems easily.  For the above example we had DaemonNet
and CipNet.  Ok, so the polling addresses are:  DaemonNet=38:666/0 and
CipNet=18:222/0 (for the example's purposes).  You would write your ROUTE.IM
like this:

  Schedule @ All
   HOLD 38:666/0
   HOLD 18:222/0

  Schedule A All
   UNHOLD 38:666/0
   POLL 38:666/0

  Schedule B All
   UNHOLD 18:222/0
   POLL 18:222/0

This would simply allow you two events, A and B.  Say event A was to be
executed at 2:45am and event B was to be executed at 4:00am, this would just
distinguish between the two polls, while keeping all mail destined for the host
system held until the time you want to send it all and receive at the same
time.  It's not as hard as it sounds.

That should just about do it.  If you've followed everything outlined in this
little help file, and you have begun to understand what I'm talking about,
setting up automatic polling for a variety of nets is easy.  Just remember the
following:

        @ = 24hr event, always active.  Can't be deleted
        X = eXternal event (defined in your batch file, and the event is set to
            trigger an errorlevel that corresponds with one in your batch file,
            used primarily for daily maintenance)
      A-Z = any other event you want, defined in your route.im (or route.fd)
            files as a Schedule

Easy eh?  Well, if you can't figure something out, let me know.  I'm going to
begin writing "The Dummies Guide to InterMail and FrontDoor" and will be
releasing it in the near future.  This "Dummies Guide" will be a step by step
walk-thru on how to setup InterMail or FrontDoor, taking you through everything
conceivable.  It will also include the FrontDoor and partial InterMail docs I
possess, and just about anything having to do with the two frontend mailers I
can think of, including revised Renegade and Oblivion/2 batch files.  I've
found a few bugs in the past releases I've made of the batch files.

If you have any comments or suggestions for the upcoming Dummies Guide, or
something you would like extra detail and explanation on, you can leave me
email on the following boards (if you don't know the numbers, fuck ya, find
someone who does) or send me netmail to my bbs, or leave me echomail in the
following nets:

Boards:
Psychotic Rebellion
Liquid Insanity
Midnight Madness
Unforseen Danger
Stellar Nights
Digital Frontier

(on the above boards I go by the alias Lord Soth)

Nets:
AdventureNet
CiPNet
CrimeNet
DaemonNet

Or send netmail to Lasher at DaemonNet@38:666/0



