Getting Started with RTTYMailer

RTTYMailer is how you get your text onto a teletype machine that someone else is running. You point it at a text file, pick a channel, and press send. Minutes later that text is clattering out of a real Teletype on the other end of an internet feed.

It does that by talking directly to the internet-TTY gateway at internet-tty.net. The gateway is RTTYApp — the same program that turns text into the FSK “warble” — sitting on the far end listening for submissions. So the pair works like this:

You rtty.com / internet-tty.net RTTYMailer ———— SMTP ————▶ RTTYApp ▶ RTTY audio ▶ teletypes

If you want to run your own channel and generate the audio yourself, that’s RTTYApp — see its Getting Started guide. RTTYMailer is the sending end: it’s for contributing content to channels that already exist.

RTTYMailer and RTTYApp are versioned independently. A version number here says nothing about which RTTYApp version you’re talking to.

1. What You’ll Need

A Windows PC (Windows 7 or newer). No sound card, no radio, no hardware at all — RTTYMailer only sends text over the internet.

An internet connection that permits outbound connections on ports 593–598. Some corporate and school networks block unusual ports; a home connection is normally fine.

Your amateur callsign, or whatever name you want your traffic to appear under.

2. Install

If you already have an older RTTYMailer, uninstall it first Version 21.0 moved to a different kind of installer package, so it will not replace an older install automatically — you’d end up with two copies and two entries in Programs and Features. Your settings, your queue, and anything in AutoStartMail\ are left alone by the uninstall. This only applies coming from a version before 21.0 — upgrades from 21.0 onward are normal in-place installs.

If upgrading from an older version: Settings → Apps → Installed apps, find RTTYMailer, choose Uninstall.

Download RTTYMailer-Setup-21.0.exe below.

Run it. Windows may show a SmartScreen warning (“unknown publisher”) because the installer isn’t code-signed — click More info → Run anyway. It’s safe.

It installs to C:\RTTYMailer, not Program Files. That’s deliberate: the program keeps its settings, its logs and your messages in its own folder, and Windows won’t let an ordinary user write inside Program Files.

Upgrading later is just running the newer installer — from 21.0 onward it replaces the program and leaves your settings, your queue and your messages untouched.

3. First Run

Launch RTTYMailer from the Start menu. You’ll see one window with a big empty list at the top — that’s the queue, the files waiting to be sent.

Before anything else, set “Mail From.” It ships as NoBody, and the program will refuse to send until you change it. Put your callsign there. This is what appears as the sender on the printed copy, so it’s how people know who sent the traffic.

The install includes a sample message, AutoStartMail\WELCOME.txt, so you have something harmless to practise with.

4. Sending a File

Press Get Files and pick one or more .txt files. They appear in the queue. (You can select several at once.)

Choose a channel in the Address dropdown — see §5.

Check Mail From is your callsign, not NoBody.

Press Send Mail to send everything in the queue, or Send next mail item in list to send just the first one.

The panel along the bottom is the log. Watch it: it shows the whole conversation with the gateway, and it’s where you’ll see either a cheerful message succesfully stored or an explanation of what went wrong.

Subject lines. The Subject box normally reads “Default (To use file name as subject, do not change this line)”. Leave it — the file’s name becomes the subject, which is usually what you want. Name your files descriptively and you get sensible subjects for free.

5. Choosing a Channel

The Address dropdown lists the channels from servers.ini:

Channel	What it is
ITTY	The main internet-TTY channel
Europe	The European feed
Autostart	The autostart channel
ITTY 100	The 100 wpm channel

Picking one fills in the right server address and port automatically. Each channel is a separate machine at the far end with its own audience, so send to the one that fits your content.

6. Writing a Message

Press Mail Composer for a compose window with the teletype character set in mind. Or just write .txt files in any editor and queue them with Get Files — the composer is a convenience, not a requirement.

Rules that will save you grief. RTTY is 5-bit Baudot, a 1920s character set with 32 codes. It is far more limited than you’re used to:

Type in UPPERCASE. Lowercase does not exist in Baudot.

Keep lines short — about 72 characters maximum. The gateway will reject a file outright if any line is too long.

Stick to plain punctuation. Letters, digits, and . , ? / ( ) : ; ' - are safe. Curly quotes, em-dashes, accented letters and emoji are not.

Watch pasted text. Text copied from a PDF or a web page often looks wrapped but has no real line breaks in it, so it arrives as one enormous run-on line and gets rejected. Make sure every line ends with a genuine Enter.

Remember where it’s going. This prints on someone’s machine, on paper, possibly in their living room. The gateways screen for offensive language and will refuse files that trip it.

7. Metered Mail

Metered Mail sends one queued file at a time with a fixed gap between them, instead of firing everything off at once. Tick Start Metered Mail, set Seconds Between Files, and the countdown runs. The minimum interval is 60 seconds.

Use it when you’re sending a batch and don’t want to dump twenty messages onto a channel in three seconds.

8. Advanced Controls

The Server, Port and Subject boxes are greyed out on purpose — picking a channel sets them correctly, and editing them by hand is how people break things.

If you genuinely need them (testing your own gateway, say), use Options → Field Options → Toggle Advanced Controls.

9. Where Everything Lives

All in C:\RTTYMailer, next to the program:

File	What it is
`servers.ini`	The channel list. Replaced on upgrade.
`servers_additional.ini`	Your extra channels. Never touched by the installer.
`RTTYMailer.INI`	Main window settings and the saved queue.
`RTTYEditor.INI`	Compose window settings.
`YYYYMMDD.log`	One log per day — the full conversation with the gateway.
`AutoStartMail\`	Composed and queued messages.

Adding your own gateway. If you run your own RTTYApp, don’t edit servers.ini — it gets replaced when you upgrade. Create servers_additional.ini instead, which the installer never overwrites. One channel per line:

name;address;port;
MyShack;192.168.1.50;593;

The trailing semicolon is required. Without it the port won’t be read and the entry silently won’t work.

If the name you want to display isn’t a legal mail address — because it has a space in it, for instance — add a fourth field with the actual mailbox:

My Shack;192.168.1.50;593;MYSHACK;

The list shows My Shack; the mail goes to MYSHACK. That’s exactly how the ITTY 100 entry works.

10. When Something Goes Wrong

Read the log panel at the bottom, or today’s YYYYMMDD.log. The usual suspects:

What you see	What it means
`Mail From "NoBody" is not allowed`	Put your callsign in the Mail From box (§3).
`550 No such user here`	The gateway doesn’t recognise that address. Re-pick the channel from the dropdown rather than typing it.
`not sent because of line length greater than 0`	A line in your file is too long. Re-wrap to 72 characters (§6).
`not sent because of bad word violation`	The gateway’s content filter rejected it.
`Can't resolve [...]`	DNS or connectivity problem — check you’re online.
`Connection Failed`	Reached the internet but not that port. A firewall is the usual cause.
`Cannot open server list`	`servers.ini` is missing from `C:\RTTYMailer`. Reinstall.

A message is only really delivered when you see 250 message succesfully stored as "<name>.txt". Anything else means it didn’t arrive.

11. Updating & Getting Help

Updates: download the newer RTTYMailer-Setup-<version>.exe from rtty.com and run it. From 21.0 onward it upgrades in place and preserves your settings, your queue and your messages. (Coming from a pre-21.0 version, uninstall the old one first — §2.)

What changed: version 21.0 also carries forward several years of fixes that were completed but never published, including servers_additional.ini support and a fix for messages being silently truncated mid-transmission — so anyone upgrading from the site’s previous v16 is getting more than the 21.0 work alone.

Community & help: the GreenKeys teletype mailing list (mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/greenkeys) is where the teletype crowd hangs out, and more documentation lives right here on rtty.com.

Now go put something on the wire. 73.