a.u.o intro: What are QWK and BlueWave?

QWK and BlueWave are the names of popular packet formats in the BBS
community. QWK was originally created to get messages for PC-Board
bulletin boards and FidoNet "mail areas" (the equivalent of netnews
newsgroups).  It became a de-facto standard since more and more QWK
readers are available not only on MS-DOS machines but on all
architectures.

However, the QWK and BlueWave formats are not capable of carrying
RFC-compliant messages such as Internet mail and netnews.  Some
efforts have been made to adapt QWK to netnews, but at best the
extra information present in netnews messages has been ignored by
existing readers, and at worst the extra information is truncated
or lost.  Some of this information, for example the Message-ID:
and References: headers, is very important to netnews, and the
loss of this information causes problems for other netnews
readers.

Some packages try to put all the RFC-compliant header information
in the _bodies_ of the messages, which creates a lot of ugly
messages when these aren't intercepted, but also doesn't solve
the problem of creating _correct_ headers, since the QWK programs
will just let any old garbage out, and your messages can silently
disappear, without you getting any warning until it's too late.

As mentioned, there are already a _ton_ of QWK readers.  if you're
looking for a programming project, see the next section.  it'll be
about as much work, but a lot more fun because it's a lot less
likely to be ignored once you finish.