🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <yFmIRDAFRCRzEw7I@objmedia.demon.co.uk>
           snail@objmedia.demon.co.uk "Snail" writes:

[snippety]

> So could someone please tell me what protocol I should be trying to use, 
> and if I should be talking to something other than post.demon.co.uk.
> I'd be most grateful for the pointers.

I bet you hadn't thought of making the leap to running an SMTP *server*
on your machine?  That's what Turnpike, the basic DOS KA9Q system, and
many other implementations do.  Demon's end automatically starts up as a
SMTP client (could be more than one, on each of the punt clusters)
within a *very* short time after your dial-up completes with routing
being established.  If you've got an SMTP server sitting there listening
(and can fork off additional ones for each incoming connection request)
then you handle incoming mail the same way as Demon's end handles your
outgoing mail.  

So the short answer is that you shouldn't be talking to *anything*; you
should be *listening*!

> Likewise, I'm sure I'll run into the same protocol requirements/troubles
> for news, so pointers on what demon use will be gratefully received.

Unlikely; both for retrieving news and for posting new news, your end
will run an NNTP client, talking to the server on Demon's news machine.

> The project? Well we're doing some software for use by blind people.

It was my understanding that blind users were already well served through
a combination of KA9Q under raw DOS (windozy things, requiring pointing
a mouse accurately, are of little use to the blind, AIUI) with speech
synthesizers.  There are at least a couple of blind users of KA9Q who
post from time to time in the d.i.s.pc newsgroup,

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                         bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce
     the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know
     this is not true."            Robert Wilensky, University of California