[nos-bbs] Seriously revisiting B2F and "E" messages ???

[Maiko Langelaar]

Being a developer first, and a sysop second is dangerous. My level of sysop
and practical forwarding knowledge is a far second to the development side
of things unfortunately. I've learned tons, but there are guys out there
who truly know the operational side of this better then I ever will :(

I have wondered sometimes if introducing B2F (and my implementation to
date is far from near to perfect) into JNOS was a mistake, for the general
population that is. I mean seriously, there is no benefit to using B2F for
most NOS to NOS setups, if anyone thinks otherwise, I would be glad to sit
back and listen. The "E" message itself comes from a Winlink/RMS/Airmail
system, so the fact that it has appeared on a NOS exchange is because it
is getting passed along, the originating station was not a NOS station.

I'm a systems integrator, I thought (perhaps naively) that having the
ability to pass messages between W2LK and NOS was perhaps useful ? Like
I said, the code is far from perfect, but is workable.

Questions : Perhaps I should leave B2F undefined in the default compile.

    Any objections to this ?

    Then those who truly want to try the RMS/W2LK/Airmail <-> JNOS thing,
    and there are probably very few out there, have the option to compile
    B2F still, all they have to do is make the change in config.h ?

    Comments ?

> - search logs for "FC EM" to see who is connecting to you with B2F enabled,
>  so that you can tell them to create mbox nob2f entries for you and all of
>  their forwarding partners

Good ideas. The 'mbox nob2f' command is still there, it simply controls the
level of SID we present to a connecting system. With B2F disabled at compile
time or 'mbox fbb 2', it is of course not an issue.

> - search each AREA.txt file for "X-BBS-Msg-Type: E"; if so [snip] ...

Same thing.

> Even if you and your partner have the mbox nob2f statements, you can still

> unwittingly forward affected "E" messages from further back along the line.

Questions : what should we or could we do about this ? Convert to 'P' ? or
             do we stop and reject the message as not forwardable ?

Maiko