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 UUCP ...att!whscad1!kqb INTERNET COMPUSERVE >INTERNET: Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=611