The idea of ListWiszard is to get away from mail clients that attempt to do too much with the result that lines are trimmed to 70 characters without attention to the likes of long URLs that ought to be double-clickable by the recipient.

Other things like the ability of the recipient to choose font size and to copy and paste into a word processor are also a continuing PITA.

The Simple Mail Transport protocol SMTP allows for 998 characters in a line - or paragraph if you like the word better. All mail clients created after the demise of CP/M on a Commodore 64 can handle long lines like that with word wrapping at the destination.

ListWiszard just bypasses your mail application and makes a direct connection to your SMTP server on port 25 somewhere. You have to provide your servers domain name or IP address.

Links to the source and sample files are:

To prepare a message to be sent you need to make up a text file that is the message to be sent. It will contain at the beginning a line:

__CONTROL__

with nothing else. After that line you need to specify some things in the form of a line starting with a command that ends with a colon and some white space. After that you can change things.

After all changes the line:

__BODY__

terminates commands. Below that is the text of your message as it appears in a word processor or text editor. Paragraphs that wrap are OK but they really shouldn't be more than 998 characters long. We're talking simple ASCII text here. As of right now there is no provision for special things like unicode or even high-byte special characters that require the OPTION key to produce.

A line consisting of:

__END__

Terminates a message as it will be sent. You can include comments to yourself after that and they will be ignored.

After the text file is ready you can do several things to send off the message:

1) Select all and copy to the clipboard. Then execute the ListWiszard applescript application.

2) Save the file as TEXT, which may be difficult depending on just how "helpful" the editor is, and then drag and drop the text file onto the ListWiszard icon or an alias to it.

3) Open Terminal.app or a BBEdit worksheet and execute shell commands like perl whizz.pl which will do the same thing except that you can use more debugging options that way.

A couple of sample message files are included in this distribution. They document the various commands you can make. The best way to understand what's going on is to read the perl source code which isn't really that tough. Try it.

I recommend that your first tests consist of a message to yourself and to me before you try too much with a whole list of email addresses. Be especially careful in debugging modes which might reveal email addresses and passwords to others.

Doug McNutt dmcnutt@macnauchtan.com Wed Jul 26 15:15:40 MDT 2006