From: vanes002@maroon.tc.umn.edu (John Van Essen) Subject: DOOM-related Downloads via E-mail (98/03/01) Newsgroups: rec.games.computer.doom.announce,rec.games.computer.doom.help Followup-To: poster Organization: RGCD Support Team Approved: doom@mantis.co.uk Summary: Describes how to get files from a DOOM-related FTP site via e-mail. Rec-games-computer-doom-announce-archive-name: howto-ftpmail Posting-Frequency: monthly | () Getting DOOM Files via E-mail. . (98/03/01) | [ Mar 01 - Updated URLs and IP addresses, added info about # of parts] If you do not have FTP access, but can receive and process uuencoded multi-part e-mail messages (with a uudecode program), you can fetch files by e-mail from some of the FTP servers hosting the DOOM archives. The primary DOOM Archive and some of the mirrors also run a service called ftpmail that connects to an FTP server, performs FTP operations, and mails the results back to the user that requested the service. This means that the FTP transfer rate for ftpmail fetches is very fast, since it talks to itself (the packets don't even leave the machine). E-mail requests are delivered promptly and processed quickly. Results are mailed with Precedence: bulk; prime-time delivery takes a while. This is a very good option for those who cannot do FTP, but have e-mail. Common sense and courtesy should be exercised when submitting requests: * Do not submit jobs during the host's prime time. * Do not submit jobs during your country's prime time (9am to 4pm?). * Do not submit jobs for big files (1M or more) except on weekends. In the U.S. (for example) jobs should be submitted between 1700-0200 EDT (1600-2300 PDT) if possible. Tiny jobs would be OK at other times. Most ftpmailers do FTP transfers in binary mode by default. This does not hurt text files, so you can leave the mode set to binary. It is also intelligent enough to recognize a binary file (such as a zip file) and will automatically uuencode it (by default) when mailing it to you. This makes things *very* easy! You just "get" the file, and let the mailer decide what to do! When you receive uuencoded messages, save them to files with names using the part number in the message Subject: (save part 1 as a01, part 2 as a02, etc.). Don't save them in the order that you get them. Then use "uudecode" on the first file - "uudecode a01". Most (if not all) versions of uudecode are smart enough to advance the file name automatically to get the next file if there is more than 1 part. What you'll end up with is the file that was originally uuencoded - usually a zip file. Zip files can be unzipped using pkunzip v2.04g | or any other zip-file-aware program, like WinZip or unzip. | PKZIP v2.04g and R.E.M UUENCODE/UUDECODE v6.56 are available by FTP from this SimTel mirror (or any other SimTel mirror): ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/simtelnet/msdos/arcers/pkz204g.exe | ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/simtelnet/msdos/decode/uuexe656.zip Here are the entries from the "DOOM: FTP and WWW Sites List" article for those DOOM Archive sites that have ftpmailer running locally: | California: ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/ (Primary Site) 165.113.121.81 New York: ftp://ftp.gamers.org/pub/games/idgames/ 128.205.37.150 Sweden: ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/idgames/ 130.238.253.4 To submit jobs for the ftpmailer, send a message with ftpmailer commands to "ftpmail@_archive_site_name". Commands for some ftpmailers differ from those of the original ftpmailer at decwrl, so get the help for it. | Here are some examples of message bodies to send to ftpmail@ftp.gamers.org: (1) Get help (all lines beyond 'help' line are always ignored): help (2) Send the files listing the most recent uploads to your buddy: reply buddy@other.mail.address open cd /pub/games/doom get LAST.24hours get LAST.7days quit (3) Get the DOOM WAD specs and the zipped Official DOOM FAQ: open cd /pub/games/doom/docs/editing get dmspec16.txt cd /pub/games/doom/docs/faqs get dmfaq66.zip quit (4) Get the DOOM II pix (will be split into many separate messages): open cd /pub/games/doom cd graphics get doom2pcx.txt get doom2pcx.zip quit Read the ftpmailer's 'help' for further information. If you use the above examples, remove the leading white space on the lines. | By default, files are split into approximately 60,000-byte chunks. | Binary files are converted into a format that takes 33% more space, | so multiply the size of a binary file by 4/3 to get the mailing size. | For example, doom2pcx.zip is 717327 bytes x 4/3 = 956436 bytes. | 956436 divided by 60,000 is 15.94, so that's about a 16-part email | (it's actually a 17-parter because of allowance for email overhead). John Van Essen Author of R.G.C.D RFD