Squish (FidoNet)

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Squish is both the name of a FidoNet mail tossing application originally designed for DOS and OS/2, and the name of the primary mail storage format in which this application stores FidoNet and other local BBS messages. Before Squish, open storage formats for FidoNet and Bulletin Board messages were relatively slow and inefficient. The primary functions of the Squish application in a FidoNet system are to:

Unpack incoming mail archives.
Examine and sort incoming mail, and either:
1. Store it in the appropriate local message bases for later reading by a BBS user or a FidoNet mail reading application.
2. Place it into an outgoing mail archive, if addressed to another system.
Examine mail being sent from a FidoNet system, and attach routing information to each message.
Archive outgoing messages appropriately, for archives to be later transferred by independent FidoNet mailer software.

Squish was originally developed by Scott J. Dudley through his company, Lanius Corporation, in conjunction with his Maximus BBS software. Squish existed as a separate application, however, and its open specifications resulted in it often being used within other FidoNet and BBS-related systems.

In 2002, the source code for Squish was released under the GNU General Public License, in the same code-base as the Maximus BBS software. It has since been ported to run under Win32, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems.