X-Message-Number: 611
From: Kevin Q. Brown
Subject: Cryonics Email Directory and more ... 
Date: 20 Jan 1992

Message #593.1 has the first version of the cryonics email directory,
which you can obtain by sending email to me with the Subject line:
    CRYOMSG 593.1
Thank you to everyone who requested their names & email addresses to be
put in the directory and thanks to all who provided suggestions, comments,
criticism, and/or, especially, praise.  (My apologies for not replying to
you directly.)  Please send any additions, corrections, etc. to me for the
next version of this directory.

As I noted in message #595, the name "593.1" is not very memorable
and we need a better name for this directory.  Here is my scheme ...

All the 600+ messages to date have been fixed; once mailblasted they
do not change.  Updates are sent as new mailblasts, with new message
numbers.  For example, message #286 (directory of cryonics organizations
and publications) was remailblasted as #552.1 when it was last updated.
I have created a new class of messages, those that get updated without
changing their numbers.  The cryonics email directory is one of those
messages.

Message #0000 is the directory of these frequently updated messages.
Here is what it currently looks like:

  Directory of Frequently Updated Cryonics Messages     (Updated 20 Jan. 1992)
  -------------------------------------------------

  0000 - Directory of Frequently Updated Cryonics Messages
  0001 - Index to all cryonics mailing list messages
  0002 - Directory of cryonics mailing list subscribers
	 (who requested to be listed in this directory)
  0003 - CRYOMSG archive retrieval mechanism
  0004 - List of cryonics organizations and publications
  0005 - Suggested reference messages for new subscribers

Message #0002 is the cryonics email directory.  But #0001 got in ahead
of it because it's even older.  This is the index to the 600+ cryonics
email messages, one line per message.  I mailblast excerpts from it
every 100 messages.  (Its size is about 37 Kbytes and growing.)
Message #0003 is an explanation of how the CRYOMSG archive retrieval
mechanism works.  Message #0004 is a small variation on #552.1.  (When
the changes grow larger you will want to get your own copy of #0004.)
Message #0005 is derived from message #552.

These files are all accessible via the CRYOMSG mechanism used for
regular cryonics mailing list messages.  Thus, if you forget the
message number #593.1, you can retrieve the latest version of the
cryonics email directory by sending email to me with the Subject line:
   CRYOMSG 0002
(Note: The files "2", and "0002" are distinct even though their names
evaluate to the same number.)  If you forget both "593.1" and "0002"
then send email to me with the Subject line:
    CRYOMSG 0000
to get the index to the 0* messages.

One more thing.  I changed the CRYOMSG mechanism slightly.  Instead of
handling just expressions of the form:
    CRYOMSG xxx yyy zzz ... www
where "xxx", "yyy", etc. are strings of the characters "0123456789.",
it now allows also "[]-" to enable some limited regular expression types
of strings.  For example,
    CRYOMSG 58[1-5]
is equivalent to:
    CRYOMSG 581 582 583 584 585
and:
    CRYOMSG 58[1489]
is equivalent to:
    CRYOMSG 581 584 588 589
(The Subject line "CRYOMSG 581 - 585" still will not work, though.)
This syntax gives you enough expressive power to request the entire
archives in one line:
    CRYOMSG [1-9] [1-9][0-9] [1-9][0-9][0-9] [1-6][0-9][0-9].[0-9] 000[0-9]
It won't give all those messages to you, though.  The limit is 25 messages
per CRYOMSG Subject line.

There is another CRYOMSG change you will want to know about, too.  Rather
than sending the requested messages to you one file per email message, the
CRYOMSG mechanism now bundles them into a digest file and emails to you
a digest file with the messages that you requested.  (The format of the
digest is the same as for the daily mailing list mailblasts.)  For example,
the Subject line:
    CRYOMSG 65 88 10[3-5]
will result in a digest file of the messages 65, 88, 103, 104, and 105
being emailed to you.  A limitation to this digestification scheme is
that if you request a lot of files your digest will be large, perhaps too
large to email to you in one piece.  To correct for that, the CRYOMSG
mechanism will split automatically any large digest into smaller files
before emailing them to you.  (Yes, my solution created a new problem
that required another solution.  That's progress!)

Enjoy the CRYOMSG-powered archives and mailing list!

			       Kevin Q. Brown
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