Q-Blue

Q-Blue is an offline mail reader for use by BBS callers.  It reads mail packets in Blue Wave or QWK format.  BBSing seems to be in decline these days, with everybody flocking to the internet instead, but it still offers value to modem users who are sick of the noise and idiocy and drivel and spam on the internet, especially Usenet.  A private bulletin board run by a hobbyist can support true conversation far better than an international newsgroup can, and you're guaranteed to encounter personalities and points of view that you would never learn about in a typical everyday lifestyle.

Q-Blue is, by most measures, the leader of the pack in BBS mail readers for the Amiga, except for those who want a "database" reader that stores old messages; these users will have to use a program called THOR instead.  Only a minority of users prefer this type of reader, because of the extra complexity and difficulty it necessitates.  The current (and almost certainly final) version of Q-Blue is v2.4, and it requires AmigaDOS 2.04 or newer to run.  And old version that can run under AmigaDOS 1.3 is also available here.

Note:  this copy of Q-Blue 2.4 has been updated on 30 November 1999 to fix a minor scrolling bug, and more recently, a problem has been corrected in the Install script.  This latest tweak also adjusts the license terms and updates the "contact the author" section of the manual.

Click Here to download Q-Blue 2.4 in LHA archive format (378k)

Click Here to download Q-Blue 1.0, an older version with more limited features which can run under AmigaDOS 1.2 (LHA archive format, 239k)

Click Here to download the complete source code for Q-Blue 2.4 (Zip archive, 307k), or get it from Github.

• Extensive support for the various systems that BBSes sometimes use for offering indirect Internet email (such BBSes can be very valuable for those without the budget for a full-size ISP account)
• Automation of Fido netmail on systems that normally require clumsy manual kluges
• The 25 character QWK format limit on subject line length is automatically worked around on many systems that have ways to do this (three different methods supported)
• Full support for the most recent (type 3) Blue Wave format features
• Year 2000 handling built in from the beginning
• Support for advanced text editors, including options to load the message you are quoting from into a separate window from the reply you are writing
• Silly taglines can be added manually, randomly, or sequentially; the supplied sample file has plenty of good ones (and also plenty of dated ones by now...)
• Automatic recognition of message archive compression type, extensible to new compression formats
• The user interface has been highly praised for intuitive ease of use, despite some departures from standard Amiga styles (for instance, one user called it "the most friggin' awesome QWK/Blue Wave reader on any platform").
• And the whole program has been equally praised for robustness and dependability.

Through most of its history, Q-Blue was shareware with a registration price of $20, and a limit of four replies per upload packet in the unregistered version.  Now, with both BBSing and Amigas falling into comparative disuse, it is freeware, with source available.

Here's a screen shot, showing me selecting a tagline for a reply I'm writing:

(A minor note: I have found that the name "Q-Blue" was used in a couple of other unrelated areas.  There was a game for the Atari Falcon computer called Q-Blue, with a successor called Q-Blue Plus, there is a jazz band called Q-Blue, and lately there's a small web hosting company called QBlue.  I used the name first.)

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