A line of text, maximum 80 characters, at the end of an
echomail message (on
Fidonet or an
FTN), which provides information about the
node the message was posted on. Origin lines start with the string
* Origin:. (the Origin MUST be capitalized - lowercasephiles who
hexedit their BBS software to make the O an o find that their mail is improperly exported.)
Origin lines take the form:
* Origin: text text text (31:3373/1)
The * Origin: denotes the start of the origin line, the text that follows is supposedly the name of the node (BBS) from which the message comes, though many sysops use this space to write tagline style comments, and the numbers in brackets provide information about the node and network. (The first number is the zone, the second number is the area, and the third number is the actual individual node number. For instance, on FidoNet, zone 1 was north america, area 604 was vancouver, and so the host for vancouver for fidonet would be node 1:604/0. Hosts are almost always assigned node numbers of 0, while other nodes are generally assigned sequential numbers, either by 1s or by 100s, though many smaller echomail nets just assign node numbers at random or whimsy. The only hard and fast rule about node IDs is that the area should be a larger or equal number than the zone, or most front-end mailers will have trouble with routing.)