Stairways releases RumorMill 1.2
Perth, Western Australia — Stairways Software, Pty Ltd, today
announced the release of version 1.2 of RumorMill, its shareware Mac
OS News (NNTP) server.
What is RumorMill?
RumorMill is a news (NNTP) server. The News protocol is ideally
suited to public discussion, and RumorMill is designed to make it
easy to create (and remove) local or shared Newsgroups. RumorMill
(and other NNTP) servers can easily be linked together to create a
wide spanning communication network.
RumorMill is ideal for business groups, schools, universities and any
one else who is interested in a simple, scalable and widely supported
means of providing group discussion. RumorMill can easily mix USENET
newsgroups with local or off-site newsgroups which can be selectively
pulled or fed from multiple servers.
RumorMill can be Remotely Administered, supports Newswatcher Prefs
and Newsrc files and it has a small memory footprint. Amongst other
security features RumorMill has Site Restrictions which can be used
to prevent off-site (based on TCP/IP address) computers accessing the
server.
RumorMill is US$35 shareware. Site and organisation-wide licenses are
also available. Previous registered users of RumorMill can upgrade to
RumorMill 1.2 for US$20. RumorMill 1.2 is a free upgrade for users
who registered after Jan 1, 1999.
Features
* Quick and Easy Setup
* Remote Configuration
* Support Multiple Host Servers
* Active Pull (or ‘Suck’) capability
* Site Restricitions Security Masks
* User/Password restrictions
* EMail (-) News Gateway capability
* Small Memory Footprint
* Configuration using Newswatcher files
What’s New?
Version 1.2 of RumorMill adds the following major features to those
found in previous releases of RumorMill.
RumorMill 1.2 can provide a gateway between EMail and USENET.
Articles posted to specified newsgroups can be automatically EMailed.
In addition, RumorMill can be configured to periodically check a POP
EMail account for EMail to be post to specified newsgroups. These
capabilities allow one to create a complete gateway between USENET
and EMail.
The system administrator can choose to have RumorMill EMail nightly
reports of statistics, additions/deletions of groups at remote
servers, and notification of groups created or deleted via control
articles. Each of these classes of EMail can be independently enabled
or disabled.
The NNTP streaming protocol is now supported for faster transfer of
articles. Use of the streaming protocol can be independently enabled
or disabled for both incoming and outgoing articles.
Full support for moderated groups. Articles posted to moderated
newsgroups are now EMailed to the specified newsgroup moderator.
A number of minor enhancements have also been added in RumorMill 1.2.
These include:
* Article expiration on a per group basis
* Support for the new emerging NNTP standard
* Improved database management, including better processor sharing
* Connection retry capability for slow connection initation
* Minor performance enhancements
* Log file size limits
* and many others
What Other People Have Said About RumorMill
“The news (-) email gateway is elegant and essential! I just couldn’t
seem to make time for even the newsgroups I genuinely cared about,
but with RumorMill 1.2, those groups I designate are now handled as
easily and directly as any mailing list, right in my email program.”
– Larry Yaeger, 3 Feb 1999.
“Well, right off the bat I would say that RumorMill 1.2 truely keeps
to the tradition of the Macintosh, making setting up a news server a
quick and painless process while providing a no compromise feature
set compariable to many commercial programs priced higher in orders
of magnitude.” – Hai Ng, 4 Feb 1999.
Some Features in Detail
Remote Configuration: RumorMill comes in two parts: RumorMill and
RumorMill Setup. This keeps the memory footprint small, and
configuration is separated from the main application. RumorMill Setup
connects via TCP/IP, which means RumorMill can be configured remotely
(if you have the password!): ideal for headless machines.
Multiple Hosts: RumorMill allows you to receive news from, and send
news to, up to seven other sites. In fact you can use RumorMill to
selectively distribute newsgroups to other servers, making your own
news network.
Site Restrictions: RumorMill can restrict access on the basis of the
IP number: a simple and convenient way of stopping access by
computers of the local network.
User Restrictions: You can configure Users with Usernames and
Passwords. Each User has a Can Post flag which (in combination with
other controls) restricts who can post to the server, and who can
only read.
EMail -) News Gateway: You can configure RumorMill 1.2 to deliver
news postings directly to your mailbox. Simply use the RumorMill
Setup to specify which newsgroups should have articles sent via
EMail. And just as easily, you can reply via EMail and have the reply
posted to your favourite newsgroups. Use RumorMill Setup to configure
RumorMill to retrieve EMail from a POP account and RumorMill will
post that EMail into the proper newsgroup(s).
About Stairways Shareware
Stairways Shareware was founded and is run by Peter N Lewis. Peter
started Stairways to distribute his extensive range of Macintosh
Internet applications.
Peter is probably best known for Anarchie, but he also co-wrote the
Internet Config system with Quinn “The Eskimo”, he was a programmer
on Metrowerks’ Java release and he also authored the most widely used
FTP server for the Macintosh, NetPresenz. Peter is a prolific author
of high-quality Macintosh software.
Stairways Shareware distributes software using the shareware
principles: try before you buy and minimal or no marketing costs. As
a result shareware costs a fraction of the price of most other
commercial software.
Stairways currently has four employees.
Contact Information:
Jim Calvin (JCalvin@MacConnect.com)
Stairways Support (support@stairways.com.au)
Press Contact (contact@stairways.com.au)
World Wide Web (http://www.stairways.com/)
FTP: (ftp://ftp.stairways.com/stairways/)
Phone and FAX contact is not available.