Abstract: In an arrangement for communication between a base station and further stations of a mail processing machine and for the emergency shut-off thereof, two interfaces are provided per station in order to connect two neighboring stations as an interface and the mail processing machine is fashioned so as to be expandable in unlimited fashion toward both sides. The control arrangement is programmed to evaluate the incoming message or to forward it to the other interface when it is not directed to the receiving station. Hardware and software stages are provided so that every station can activate an emergency shut-off of all stations via an emergency off-line.

Abstract: In a method and apparatus for improving data integrity using a ring buffer, a ring buffer is formed by at least one of the memory areas of a non-volatile read-write memory being administered by a pointer counter such that a ring buffer that can be read out and written is produced in a non-volatile read-write memory. The ring buffer composed of a number of memory cells needed for conventional operation, expanded by one additional memory cell, and a cyclical pointer counter. The oldest dataset is overwritten in a write operation, and whereby the pointer counter is incremented after the new dataset was written into a memory cell in which the oldest dataset was previously located, so that the pointer of the aforementioned pointer counter now points to a memory cell having what is now an oldest dataset that can be overwritten in the next write operation.