2. General Information

2.1 History

Me and a friend of mine (zeno), were poor students of University of Padua (Italy). We love linux.

PLOR, for us, were an experimental program, which could help us in learning C language; if it will work as an offline reader... well, much better :-)

Now PLOR, is developed by me, with help of other guys at ProSA srl, a company devoted to developing open-source software.

2.2 Why use plor

Some of you could ask why plor exists.

Well, let me stress that plor is an OFFLINE News & Mail READER. This is useful for people using modem, or people which can use the computer only at home, where there is a Linux Box without an internet connection.

There are a lot of programs for people who want to read mail and news offline, but none of this has all the features that I want. These are:

• the ability to use my real mailbox and my real .newsrc, so I can read news & mail both when I am at university (with a full internet connection), and when I am at home offline, without loosing track of what I have already read
• the ability to be used with a TCP/IP connection (PPP, SLIP, etc.) or with a terminal one (sz and rz are always 10% faster than a PPP connection)
• the ability to be run on my provider server, so when I connect I have only to download my `gzip -9' news & mail packet.

Those abilities are achieved with uqwk and a uqwk reader. uqwk already exists for Linux, but there's no good uqwk reader (I hate atp!). So I write plor.

2.3 Offline reading with PLOR - miniHOWTO

I use:

uqwk +m +n -r +L 

to download news & mail on my provider server (or on a machine at university); then I pack all the *.MSG file in a newsmail.zip file with `gzip -9'

These file can be put on a floppy disk, if I am in console at university, or can be downloaded via my PPP connection, or also using minicom. This is versatile.

When I have newsmail.zip at home, I simply unzip it, and use plor to read and post.

When plor exits, it will create a REPLY.zip file, which I uploaded next time I connect (or go to university), and post my new mail messages and news posts with uqwk.

For more information: man uqwk.

2.4 Authors

Davide Barbieri paci@prosa.it

via Aldo Moro 36, 
Campagnola di Brugine 
35020 Padova Italy 

Prosa Progettazione Sviluppo Aperto srl prosa@prosa.it

via Degli Zabarella 3,
Padova, 35121 Italy.
Tel: 049660519
Fax: 0498780504

2.5 Copyright

Plor is FREE SOFTWARE.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.