Perth, Western Australia -- 14 Oct 1999 -- Stairways Software, Pty Ltd,
today announced the release of version 1.2.2 of RumorMill, its shareware
Mac OS News (NNTP) server.

Download URL: ftp://ftp.stairways.com/stairways
Info URL: http://www.stairways.com/rumormill

What is RumorMill?

RumorMill is a news (NNTP) server. The News protocol is ideally suited to
public discussion, and RumorMill is designed to make it easy to create (and
remove) local or shared Newsgroups. RumorMill (and other NNTP) servers can
easily be linked together to create a wide spanning communication network.

RumorMill is ideal for business groups, schools, universities and any one
else who is interested in a simple, scalable and widely supported means of
providing group discussion. RumorMill can easily mix USENET newsgroups with
local or off-site newsgroups which can be selectively pulled or fed from
multiple servers.

RumorMill can be Remotely Administered, supports Newswatcher Prefs and
Newsrc files and it has a small memory footprint. Amongst other security
features RumorMill has Site Restrictions which can be used to prevent
off-site (based on TCP/IP address) computers accessing the server.

RumorMill is US$95 for commercial use and $35 for personal use. Site and
organisation-wide licenses are also available (contact
andrew@stairways.com). RumorMill 1.2.2 is a free upgrade from all previous
versions.

Features

* Quick and Easy Setup
* Remote Configuration
* Support Multiple Host Servers
* Active Pull (or 'Suck') capability
* Site Restricitions Security Masks
* User/Password restrictions
* EMail (-) News Gateway capability
* Small Memory Footprint
* Configuration using Newswatcher files

What's New?

Version 1.2.2 of RumorMill is primarily a bug fix release. A few issues
found by the RumorMill user community are addressed in this release. These
issues include:

* RumorMill Setup now correctly handles long group lists and
multiple selections in the newsfeeds preferences
* The maximum acceptable article size preference was added to
the security dialog in RumorMill Setup
* RumorMill now logs the fact that articles have been discard
because they exceed the maximum acceptable article size.
* RumorMill Setup now correctly detects and notifies the user
if the server is unavailable
* RumorMill now detects and removes null headers in articles
posted by clients
* RumorMill no longer truncates data greater than 255
characters returned by (X)HDR
* Handling of the "Expires" header was improved to accept
infrequently encountered time and date formats
* RumorMill now handles temporary files that could prevent
database rebuilds

What Other People Have Said About RumorMill

"The news (-) email gateway is elegant and essential! I just couldn't seem
to make time for even the newsgroups I genuinely cared about, but with
RumorMill 1.2, those groups I designate are now handled as easily and
directly as any mailing list, right in my email program." - Larry Yaeger, 3
Feb 1999.

"Well, right off the bat I would say that RumorMill 1.2 truely keeps to the
tradition of the Macintosh, making setting up a news server a quick and
painless process while providing a no compromise feature set compariable to
many commercial programs priced higher in orders of magnitude." - Hai Ng, 4
Feb 1999.

Some Features in Detail

Remote Configuration: RumorMill comes in two parts: RumorMill and RumorMill
Setup. This keeps the memory footprint small, and configuration is
separated from the main application. RumorMill Setup connects via TCP/IP,
which means RumorMill can be configured remotely (if you have the
password!): ideal for headless machines.

Multiple Hosts: RumorMill allows you to receive news from, and send news
to, up to seven other sites. In fact you can use RumorMill to selectively
distribute newsgroups to other servers, making your own news network.

Site Restrictions: RumorMill can restrict access on the basis of the IP
number: a simple and convenient way of stopping access by computers of the
local network.

User Restrictions: You can configure Users with Usernames and Passwords.
Each User has a Can Post flag which (in combination with other controls)
restricts who can post to the server, and who can only read.

EMail -) News Gateway: You can configure RumorMill 1.2 to deliver news
postings directly to your mailbox. Simply use the RumorMill Setup to
specify which newsgroups should have articles sent via EMail. And just as
easily, you can reply via EMail and have the reply posted to your favourite
newsgroups. Use RumorMill Setup to configure RumorMill to retrieve EMail
from a POP account and RumorMill will post that EMail into the proper
newsgroup(s).

About Stairways Shareware

Stairways Shareware was founded and is run by Peter N Lewis. Peter started
Stairways to distribute his extensive range of Macintosh Internet
applications.

Peter is probably best known for Anarchie, but he also co-wrote the
Internet Config system with Quinn "The Eskimo", he was a programmer on
Metrowerks' Java release and he also authored the most widely used FTP
server for the Macintosh, NetPresenz. Peter is a prolific author of
high-quality Macintosh software.

Stairways Shareware distributes software using the shareware principles:
try before you buy and minimal or no marketing costs. As a result shareware
costs a fraction of the price of most other commercial software.

Stairways currently has four employees.

Contact Information:
Jim Calvin (JCalvin@MacConnect.com)
Stairways Support (support@stairways.com.au)
Press Contact (contact@stairways.com.au)
World Wide Web (http://www.stairways.com/)
FTP: (ftp://ftp.stairways.com/stairways/)
Phone and FAX contact is not available.