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Things you should know

An assortment of known problems, tips and tricks

Netscape

Netscape is a very poor mailreader. One of the things it makes difficult is copying email headers to the clipboard. Sam Spade will try and fix corrupted headers from Netscape, but you're much better persuading Netscape to give you real headers:

1. Select the mail message
2. Hit Ctrl-U (to show the raw message)
3. Hit Ctrl-A (to select all of it)
4. Hit Ctrl-C (to copy it to the clipboard)
5. Paste them into Sam Spade

...or...

1. Select the mail message
2. Hit View->Source...
3. Select the headers
4. Hit Ctrl-C to copy them
5. Paste them into Sam Spade

Known bugs

It would be nice if...

• Support for winsock2, to remove the dependence on icmp.dll. This will probably be needed to support NT5, and maybe Win98

Things to be aware of

• SMTP port probing is impolite, and some might claim illegal, so be nice with it. Use it only on systems you suspect of being used as relay sites.
• Scanning ports will trigger some cracker detecters
• Scanning all the ports on a machine simultaneously puts a high load on your system, which seems to give some winsocks indigestion
• The cancel search puts a high load on the newsserver, so if you're using your ISPs newsserver check during quiet times
• The web crawler is very, very dumb. It's intentionally so, but you do need to keep an eye on it. It ignores all robot exclusion protocols (that will be optional eventually), so will happily chase down infinite trees. It's a sharp tool, use it carefully.

Hacks

Text colours

(This is obsolete as of 1.14, which provides a user interface for setting the colour scheme).

If you really don't like the default colour scheme it is possible to change it

Run regedit, and open the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Blighty Design / Spade / Colour

If you're running V1.01 or earlier this key will be empty. In later releases you'll see 26 keys containing the default colours

Each key is a capital letter, A to Z, and each value is an integer containing the colour in RGB format (red in the least significant byte, green in the next byte and blue in the next byte. The most significant byte should be zero

You can probably tell that this wasn't designed in from the start, so the categorisation of these colours are a bit arbitrary

If you break things, just delete all the keys, A - Z, and it will revert to defaults

Adding whois servers

All the whois servers understood by Sam Spade are stored in the registry. If you need to add a new whois server fire up regedit, and open the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER / Software / Blighty Design / Spade / Whois

Each key is the stem of a domain name. These are searched in order of decreasing length (so if there is a key for co.uk that will be used in preference to that for uk)

The value of each key is a string containing four fields separated by a vertical bar character ('|')

The first field is a description of the domain

The second is the international dialing code for the domain, if appropriate

The third is the whois server to use for that domain

The fourth is a URL that can be used to perform searches for the domain

If you break something, just delete the appropriate key and it will revert to it's default value

If you find a whois server not listed, please send me email at spade@blighty.com so I can add it to the next release