NS mailer hack from a newsgroup on secnews.netscape.com Automatic filing/filtering of mail messages is a feature that was officially dropped before Netscape 2.0 was released. It's not supported. But it turns out that the code was never actually removed, there is just no user interface to it. Don't rely on this. It is untested. It is hard to use. It's not supported. It's not even a claimed "feature." It doesn't work in news. It has many limitations. Treat it as "as is" if at all. (I wasn't here; this conversation did not occur.) There *will* be an interface for this some day, and it will work a lot better. But for now... To filter your mail, you create a text file. On Windows, this file is called "sort.dat" and goes in the "nsmail" directory along with your mail folders. On Mac, it's called Mail Filters" and goes in your "nsmail" directory. On Unix, it's called "mailsort" and goes in your "~/.netscape/" directory. When you do "get mail", this file is consulted for each new message to decide where to put it. In the file, each line describes a pattern and an action to take. The first line which is matched by a message is executed, and subsequent matches are ignored. If no line matches, the message is left in your Inbox, as normal. The lines have three fields, seperated by tabs: the file name of the destination folder; the name of a header field to consult; and a substring to look for in that header field. For example: c:\netscape\nsmail\bounces From mailer-daemon c:\netscape\nsmail\fan-mail Subject your home page This says that if the message contains the string "mailer-daemon" in the "From" field, it should be put in the "bounces" folder instead of the "Inbox" folder. Lines beginning with "#" are comments. Blank lines are ignored. Mail files will be created as necessary, but directories will not. The full pathname of the mail folder may not contain spaces: so if you have installed Netscape in a directory which has some component whose name contains a space (as is the default on some platforms) this won't work until you rename those directories to not contain spaces. One note the unix version appends the path to nsmail so you just have to put something like Cron From cron-daemon in ~/.netscape/mailsort

Go to http://www.peak-media.com and download a copy of their NetJet browser cache. "IMHO, this is the greatest new utility since sliced bread -- speeds up browser response time on large sites (CNN, Microsoft, etc) by about 15 to 20 percent. I think it works with Internet Explorer, too. Running it with Netscape at places like CNN, STIM, etc. is like suddenly discovering the Windows for Workgroups 32-bit file access option. Much better." - Lenny Bailes

Can NetJet speeds up web access on very slow link?

AOL's working a merger with Netscape...looks serious. http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/16418.html

the wall street journal reports that this merger is more or less official!

America Online, Inc. to Acquire Netscape Communications in Stock Transaction Valued at $4.2 Billion Acquisition To Significantly Advance AOL's Multiple Brand Strategy, Broaden Audience, and Take E-Commerce to New Level AOL To Operate Most Popular and Diverse Family of Brands in Cyberspace AOL and Sun Microsystems, Inc. to Develop Next Generation of E-Commerce Solutions and Internet Devices DULLES, VA, November 24, 1998 -- America Online, Inc. (NYSE: AOL) today announced that it will acquire Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: NSCP) in a transaction that will extend America Online's leadership in interactive services. The stock-for-stock, pooling-of-interests transaction, in which stockholders of Netscape will receive 0.45 shares of AOL common stock for each share of Netscape common stock, is valued at $4.2 billion. It is expected to close in the spring of 1999, subject to various conditions including customary regulatory approvals and approval by Netscape's shareholders. The Company said it expects the transaction will be slightly accretive to operating results. Netscape's operations will remain based in Mountain View, CA. Key benefits of the acquisition will be to: Advance America Online's multiple-brand strategy with one of the Internet's best known brands; Substantially broaden America Online's global audience at home and at work, by adding the fast-growing Netscape Netcenter portal that is integrated with the Netscape browser used by millions of people; Accelerate the growth of e-commerce across the America Online and Netscape brands and provide added value to their business partners; Provide significant new opportunities to make America Online's brands available anywhere to interactive consumers, as well as to maximize the value of these brands, by taking advantage of AOL's existing shared infrastructure; and Expand the range of America Online products and services by adding world-class technology and an experienced development team that has demonstrated its ability to innovate rapidly. Separately, America Online announced that it has entered into a strategic development and marketing alliance with Sun Microsystems, Inc. to enhance its delivery of e-commerce solutions that will help build revenues across America Online and Netscape brands, and offer added value to both America Online and Netscape business partners, as well as the growing number of major corporations planning to put their business on the Internet. The companies will develop easy-to-deploy, end-to-end solutions for e-commerce based on the best available technologies and expand their sales channels to include each other's products and services. The three-year America Online-Sun agreements also will increase distribution and development of Netscape's enterprise software for corporate customers. The companies also will use Sun's Java technology to offer AOL services on selected Internet devices, consistent with AOL's "AOL Anywhere" strategy to extend its brand to all emerging mass market platforms. (See separate America Online-Sun Microsystems release.) Most Popular and Diverse Family of Brands in Cyberspace With Netscape joining its AOL, CompuServe, AOL.COM, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, and Digital City brands, America Online will operate the most popular and diverse family of brands in cyberspace. Steve Case, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of America Online, said: "The acquisition of Netscape is a big step forward for America Online that will greatly accelerate our business momentum. Netscape has played a key role in helping consumers benefit from the enormous power of the Internet, and we share the same mission. With Netscape, we will broaden our global audience at home and at work, and add world-class technology to support an expanded range of America Online interactive products and services." Mr. Case added: "The development of e-commerce is entering an exciting new stage. Increasingly, companies are seeing the power of the Internet as central to their business strategies and consumers are seeing the convenience of online shopping as central to their lives. Netscape's highly regarded suite of e-commerce software, coupled with our strategic alliance with Sun, will help us drive e-commerce to a whole new level that will benefit both business partners and Internet consumers." Mr. Case continued: "We have been very impressed with how quickly Netscape has transformed its business -- shifting its focus away from browsers and platforms and toward high-growth portal and e-commerce opportunities. We look forward to welcoming the Netscape team to our America Online family. Having known each other for many years, we know that together we can take the Internet to the next stage of its development. And as interactive services become more central to the daily lives of tens of millions of people, the promise of e-commerce becomes even more of a reality for consumers and businesses." Mr. Case concluded: "One key to this acquisition is the flexibility that it gives us. ICQ, our instant communications and chat portal, will promote the downloading and registration of the Netscape client software to its large and rapidly growing international community. We also expect to maintain our working relationship with Microsoft, continuing to include Internet Explorer in the AOL service so consumers will continue to have AOL software included on the Windows desktop." Bob Pittman, President and Chief Operating Officer of America Online, said: "Netscape has always been one of the best-known and most highly renowned Internet brands. Over the past year, Netscape has extended that brand into the portal space with Netscape Netcenter, and developed a truly differentiated portal by building useful links between the service and the Netscape client software and Netscape's enterprise business. Although Netscape Netcenter is already one of the fastest-growing portals, we believe our existing shared infrastructure will enable us to efficiently expand its audience and build its revenue streams. With AOL, CompuServe, ICQ, Digital City and now Netscape Netcenter, we will offer an unparalleled array of interactive services to the full spectrum of Internet consumers as well as to our commerce and content partners." Mr. Pittman added: "America Online has made great progress over the past few years in taking e-commerce from promise to reality, but we've only scratched the surface in reaching its full potential. Our acquisition of Netscape and the alliance with Sun will allow us to accelerate our e-commerce efforts. We will add complementary, best of breed tools and platforms to speed the time to market for companies now wanting to enter e-commerce, as well as for those ready to scale their businesses further. This will be of enormous value to both America Online and Netscape commerce partners P both business-to-business and business-to-consumers P and provide even more convenience for Internet shoppers." The Company said Jim Barksdale, President and Chief Executive Officer of Netscape, will be joining America Online's Board of Directors after the transaction closes. Mr. Barksdale said: "America Online and Netscape share a common vision - to offer solutions that make it simple for businesses and consumers to participate fully in the Net Economy. The companies' complementary strengths promise to accelerate the adoption of e-commerce and Internet applications worldwide. This exciting partnership enables us to deliver even better and more complete products and services to both existing and new customers." Netscape Brand Synonymous With Internet The Netscape brand is virtually synonymous with the Internet, including such widely used products as Netscape's browser, Netscape Netcenter, and Netscape's suite of enterprise and e-commerce applications and software. America Online will be able to efficiently speed the development of Netscape's products and services with its shared infrastructure, current advertising and commerce relationships, and ability to drive traffic from its other brands. In addition, the Netscape portal will offer connections to other America Online brands to maximize utility for customers and its value to the Company. Launched in June, Netscape Netcenter is one of the Internet's fastest growing portals worldwide in registrations, traffic and software downloads. Netscape Netcenter now has more than 9 million registered members. Since June, daily traffic has increased by 50%. In the most recent quarter, worldwide downloads exceeded 24 million, fueled in part by the release of both new beta and final versions of its browser software. In addition, Netscape has announced plans to enhance Netscape Netcenter with the recent acquisitions of AtWeb Inc., to link more than 600,000 small-business Web sites to the portal, and NewHoo! Community Directory Project to provide comprehensive Internet directory service. Netscape also has introduced the "Netscape TuneUp for IE," a free software add-on to Microsoft Internet Explorer that integrates Netscape's popular Smart Browsing services while providing access to Netscape Netcenter services. Netscape has transformed itself over the past year into a successful portal and enterprise/e-commerce software business. The Company currently offers a full suite of packaged applications for business-to-business and business-to-consumer Internet commerce, and award-winning Internet server software for building and hosting a variety of Internet applications. Netscape's corporate customers using the Company's e-commerce and infrastructure software suite include Ford, Lucent Technologies, Bell Canada, France Telecom, John Hancock and the US Department of Defense. In July, Netscape introduced its newest browser, Communicator 4.5, designed to link Netscape Netcenter's content and services with the browser's ease-of-use advances P making it simpler for people to find what they want on the Internet and creating a persistent relationship with users that helps generate higher usage levels. This month, Netscape is introducing the Custom Portal to bring the power of consumer portals to business and government audiences, including Internet service providers and computer manufacturers. As part of its effort to drive more traffic to Netscape Netcenter, America Online said it plans to continue to develop the Communicator and pursue new distribution channels. Unique Technology Solutions for E-Commerce Partners The Company said its strategic alliance with Sun Microsystems will bring together America Online's industry-leading consumer reach, Sun's e-commerce hardware and operating system platforms, and Netscape's complementary suite of e-commerce software. Together, the companies will be able to offer complete turnkey solutions along with modular software and consulting services to enable e-commerce partners to put their businesses online fast and scale quickly to meet consumer demand. "The interactive marketplace is changing quickly, and it is clear that America Online is a leader in driving e-commerce forward," said Scott McNealy, President, CEO and Chairman of Sun Microsystems. "We are incredibly excited about the opportunity to work closely with the world's leading provider of branded interactive services and to integrate our full-range of products and services into the most comprehensive turnkey e-commerce solutions." Under the America Online-Sun alliance, both companies will sell products and services through each other's sales channels and customer relationships to market their existing products and services, as well as their new e-commerce solutions. Sun's large sales and service organizations will provide technical support for these products and services. The alliance also will bring new development and distribution opportunities for Netscape's software and applications. About America Online America Online, Inc., based in Dulles, Virginia, is the world's leader in branded interactive services and content. America Online, Inc. operates two worldwide Internet online services: America Online, with more than 14 million members; and CompuServe, with approximately 2 million members. America Online, Inc. also operates AOL Studios, a leading builder of Internet brands for new market segments. Other branded Internet services operated by America Online, Inc. include AOL.COM, the world's most accessed Web site from home; Digital City, Inc., the No. 1 branded local content network and community guide on AOL and the Internet; AOL NetFind, AOL's comprehensive guide to the Internet; AOL Instant Messenger, an instant messaging tool available on both AOL and the Internet; and ICQ, an instant communication and chat technology on the Internet. This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations or beliefs as well as on a number of assumptions about future events, and are subject to factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, many outside America Online's control. The forward-looking statements in this release address subjects including the expected date of closing the acquisition, future financial and operating results, growth of the Company's audience, growth of the online commerce industry, and the development and success of new online commerce technology and platforms. The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements: the risk that the Netscape business will not be integrated successfully into the Company's business; costs related to the merger; inability to obtain approval of Netscape stockholders; inability to obtain, or meet conditions imposed for, governmental approvals for the merger; increased competition and its effects on pricing, spending, third-party relationships, the subscriber base and revenues; reliance on network service providers; inability to identify, develop and achieve commercial success for new products and services and access and distribution technologies pursuant to the development and marketing agreements with Sun; risks of new and changing regulation in the U.S. and internationally. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, especially in the Forward-Looking Statements section of the Management's Discussion and Analysis section of the Company's Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1998 and in the 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 1998, and in the Risk Factors section of the Company's most recently filed registration statement on Form S-3 filed in June 1998. Netscape and the Netscape N Logo are registered trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation in the United States and other countries. Other Netscape logos, product names, and service names, including Netcenter, Smart Browsing, Netscape Contact, Mozilla, and Netscape Open Directory are also trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation. Other product and brand names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Scripting.com has an interesting quote from a press release: "The two companies will work together to ensure that all future releases of the AOL platform will be based entirely on Java technology."

JOY!!! (Did the sarcasm come through?)

Sarcasm? Sorry, I'm not familiar with the concept...

Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 10:44:47 -0600 To: chapman@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu From: Gary Chapman Subject: LA Times column, 12/7/98 Reply-To: gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu Sender: owner-chapman@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2.07 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN X-UIDL: 601f79050a8891ebae837b6ee1c69ab8 Friends, Below is my Los Angeles Times column for today, December 7, 1998. As always, please feel free to pass this on, but please retain the copyright notice. -- Gary Gary Chapman Director The 21st Century Project LBJ School of Public Affairs Drawer Y, University Station University of Texas Austin, TX 78713 (512) 263-1218 (512) 471-1835 (fax) gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/21cp ------------------------------------------ If you have received this from me, Gary Chapman (gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu), you are subscribed to the listserv that sends out copies of my column in The Los Angeles Times and other published articles. If you wish to UNSUBSCRIBE from this listserv, send mail to listproc@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu, leave the subject line blank, and put "Unsubscribe Chapman" in the first line of the message. If you received this message from a source other than me and would like to subscribe to the listserv, the instructions for subscribing are at the end of the message. ------------------------------------------ Monday, December 7, 1998 DIGITAL NATION Duel Heats Up Over Culture of the Internet By Gary Chapman Copyright 1998, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved The proposed merger of America Online Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp. seems to have pleased Wall Street, and boosted almost all Internet stocks, but it created a sour and anxious feeling among longtime Internet activists and programmers. They see this new goliath as yet another encroachment by "the suits," the corporate culture that has recently discovered the Internet, and as perhaps the cyberspace equivalent of suburban sprawl, the "malling of America." AOL's flirtation with the metaphors of commercial TV, with its "channels" and ubiquitous advertising, raises the specter of the Internet turning into a commercial wasteland like TV, subverting the promise of cyberspace as a different kind of medium. New-media pundit Jon Katz wrote that the AOL-Netscape merger is a "catastrophe" for Net culture. The hacker and activist community on the Internet is deeply suspicious of any company that seems to harbor ambitions of being emperor of cyberspace, whether it's AOL-Netscape or Microsoft. These programmers, activists and idealists think the Internet is working just fine already, the way they created it. What seems to be shaping up is a fascinating duel between two models of Net culture, both of them gaining strength in the last year: the commercial culture of big corporations and the "gift economy" developing among thousands of computer programmers who are contributing to "open source" software such as the operating system Linux. These two models will coexist for a while, but how they interact with each other is likely to be the most interesting story in the technology field for some years to come. Linux has been the rage in all the technology press lately, in part because of its radically different development from the corporate model represented by Microsoft and its Windows operating system. A familiar story by now, Linux was first developed by Linus Torvalds in 1991, when the Finnish computer science student wanted a version of the Unix operating system to run on his 386 PC. Torvalds used software tools produced by the Free Software Foundation, an organization founded by Richard Stallman in Cambridge, Mass. Stallman's personal philosophy -- which earned him a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" -- is that software should be free and widely shared in a community committed to improving its capabilities, not unlike the way we regard scientific knowledge. This does not mean that software should cost nothing. It means that software source code, the text of a program that is interpreted by computers as instructions, should be freely available for modification and improvement by others, for the benefit of all. Torvalds put Linux into this model of software development and relied on the distributed intelligence of thousands of volunteers around the world to improve the operating system. He also made it free in the conventional sense of that word: It's available for download, without cost, through many sites on the Internet. The result is that Linux is now widely used -- estimates of its user population vary from 6 million up to 20 million people, depending on whom you ask -- and widely admired for its stability, scalability (its ability to handle large tasks) and speed. It's highly customizable because its source code is accessible to programmers, unlike that of Windows. Linux doesn't crash, or only rarely, also unlike Windows. And Linux is so fast and efficient that it can resurrect otherwise obsolete -- and therefore cheap -- computers and turn them into effective Internet servers or desktop machines. And because it's free, it greatly reduces the expense of implementing cutting-edge computing. The Mexican government, for example, last month announced that it will install Linux in 140,000 computer labs in Mexican elementary and secondary schools. Government officials estimated that Windows licenses for all these labs would cost them close to $125 million. Linux is not only free, it doesn't require replacing older computers, and it's possibly the operating system of the future -- Mexico could lead the world in producing Linux system administrators. This may be the smartest thing the Mexican government has ever done. Aside from its technical benefits, however, the most interesting thing about Linux and other open source software -- which includes the scripting language Perl and many applications -- may be the corresponding phenomenon of the open source model of development as a true social movement. And the resurrection of the idea of a "gift economy," a term with a long history in anthropology, to apply to a high-tech subculture is intriguing and portentous. The phrase was coined by French anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his 1924 book "The Gift" (translated into English in 1935), a study of the potlatch ceremonies of Northwest American Indians. It has been, since then, a paradigm of anthropological study but almost exclusively of "primitive" societies such as South Sea islanders, North American Indians and African tribes. It refers to the practice among these groups of circulating gifts -- such as blankets, shells or herd animals -- as a mode of prestige and exchange. Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1922 book, "Argonauts of the Western Pacific," wrote about the gift circulation of shell armbands among the Kula on islands near New Guinea. He wrote that one of these armbands enabled a Kula man "to draw a great deal of renown, to exhibit the article, to tell how he obtained it, and to plan to whom he is going to give it. And all this forms one of the favorite subjects of tribal conversation and gossip." This description is pretty much identical to what happens among the thousands of programmer volunteers working on open source software code, who clearly view themselves as part of a community. Their conversation and gossip can be found on Usenet sites, where people get free technical support advice, and on Web sites like Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org), which ills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters." The volume of traffic on Slashdot is astounding, with hundreds of new messages every day. And the overall gestalt of Slashdot and other open source sites is evangelical, pushing the concept of open source software as the superior method of software development. Eric Raymond, who wrote the influential open source manifesto "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/) and who is the president of a new organization called the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org/), says, "In a real gift culture, the wealth is inside the person's head, not in economic value. "One of the things that ticks me off," says Raymond, "is when the corporate types approach the Internet as a tabula rasa, as unexplored wilderness that can be transformed by corporate beneficence. They don't understand that the Internet already has its own folklore, its own heroes, its own values. If you come to the Internet like some British imperialist thinking that your mission is to civilize the natives, they're not likely to take it very well." Indeed, antipathy to Microsoft and the other "suits" of the "new economy" is part of the glue that holds the open source community together. "This is my politics, as well as my technology," Raymond adds. "When someone says 'social movement,' I typically reach for my gun -- it usually means coercion. But the open source movement is about voluntarism, cooperation, gift-giving, building community. It's about working for the benefit of everyone without anyone holding a gun to your head." It will be strange and fascinating if the real long-term threat to Microsoft is less another corporate competitor or the Justice Department and more a high-tech version of an ancient human ritual of exchange, the gift economy. Bill Gates must be watching this in utter stupefaction. Gary Chapman is director of The 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address Is gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. ------------------------------------------ To subscribe to a listserv that forwards copies of Gary Chapman's published articles, including his column "Digital Nation" in The Los Angeles Times, send mail to: listproc@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu Leave the subject line blank. In the first line of the message, put: Subscribe Chapman [First name] [Last name] Leave out the brackets, just put your name after Chapman. Send this message. You'll get a confirmation message back confirming your subscription. This message will contain some boilerplate text, generated by the listserv software, about passwords, which you should IGNORE. Passwords will not be used or required for this listserv. Mail volume on this listserv is low; expect to get something two or three times a month. The list will be used only for forwarding published versions of Gary Chapman's articles, or else pointers to URLs for online versions of his articles -- nothing else will be sent to the list. To unsubscribe from the listserv, follow the same instructions above, except substitute the word "Unsubscribe" for "Subscribe." Please feel free to pass along copies of the forwarded articles, but please retain the relevant copyright information. Also feel free to pass along these instructions for subscribing to the listserv, to anyone who might be interested in such material. Questions should be directed to Gary Chapman at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.

Browser Alert: Netscape Communicator 4.75 Final Not to be outdone by all the features added in last month's upgrade, our friends in Mountain View decided to release another one yesterday (just too late for the news to make our usual dispatch). Before this release, the only way to protect yourself from Netscape's "Brown Orifice" security hole was to disable Java in the advanced preferences menu. Now you can enjoy worry-free Java-licious surfing with the latest download, found here: http://2.digital.cnet.com/cgi-bin2/flo?y=e1Q0BBFIE0P0BcBd Check out our new Netscape Communicator Beginners Center: http://2.digital.cnet.com/cgi-bin2/flo?y=e1Q0BBFIE0P0C1lW