QWK
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
QWK is file-based offline mail reader format that was popular among bulletin board system (BBS) users, especially users of FidoNet and other networks that generated large volumes of mail. During the height of bulletin board system popularity, several dozen offline mail readers supported the QWK format.
QWK was originally developed by Mark "Sparky" Herring in 1987 for systems running the popular PCBoard bulletin board system, and was based on PCBoard's layout for message and forum files. QWK was essentially a way to collect messages from PCBoard's internal files, and re-package them into a single file.
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[edit] Architecture
Like other offline readers, QWK was similar in concept to the Fidonet as a whole: messages for a particular user are gathered up by the BBS-side QWK software, compressed using an application such as PKZIP, and then transferred to the user. This is usually accomplished via a "BBS door" program running on the BBS system, which collects mail and selected forum messages into a single file, compresses it with several "control" files into a single archive with the .QWK file extension (and typically the BBSes "id" name as the base filename), then sends it to the user automatically using the self-starting feature of the ZModem protocol.
Once the resulting file has been received by the user, the steps are reversed to extract the files from the archive and then open them in a client-side "reader". Again, these individual steps are typically automated to a degree, meaning that the user simply has to invoke the door software on the BBS and then run the client, the intermediary steps being automated.
QWK originally did not include any functionality for uploading replies, but this was quickly addressed as QWK became more popular. QWK placed replies in a .REP file (again, typically with the BBSes "id" as the name) that was exchanged automatically the next time the user called in.
Another problem with the QWK system was a number of hard-coded limits to various fields, notably things like the subject line. This made it less than useful for non-FidoNet messages, and led to the creation of the SOUP format. SOUP was essentially a version of QWK with support for much longer fields, as well as the addition of several new fields as standard to support features threading and routing. SOUP however was less widely used than the older format.
Probably the largest issue for implementing QWK is the *.NDX file which contains a record specifier in the old 4-byte MSBIN float format. This format was used by early Microsoft BASIC compilers, but has been displaced by the IEEE formats. Further, since it is a four-byte value, and is used to represent an integer, a float is a poor choice where a 32-bit integer would have been much better. As a result of this, many pieces of software do or have incorrectly generated or used the *.NDX file, and others ignore it completely.
[edit] Use
QWK clients varied widely in functionality, but all of them offered basic e-mail and public forum support. QWK was aware of the difference between these two functions, whereas FidoNet sent public messages, known as Echomail, by sending a "special" e-mail to the BBS. Prior to the introduction of QWK and similar systems, it was not uncommon for users with large message volumes to set up their own FidoNet node to quickly gather their mail, but QWK dramatically reduced the required setup to almost zero, and dramatically increased the number of users of offline mail.
QWK Format has also been used for years similarly to FTN for BBS networks, as a means of message forum syndication, by software including Synchronet, Wildcat Winserver and others.
