Re: Considering returning to Eudora

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 20:14:09 -0500, Wolf invited "more input"
(like in the "Short Circuit" movies :)

T'bird stores all my posts in one humungous file.
I find it a RPITA to find whatever post I'm looking for.

Isn't the Table of Contents (TOC) -- or another words,
the list of messages in a mailbox/mailfolder -- useful for that,
as well as the built-in "search"?
(plus all the pretty instant message list sorting options)

The built-in search is plenty fast enough for me, but
Windows Eudora v7 now comes, in paid mode, with an "Ultra-fast search"
that claims blazingly instant results on huge message collections;
the very same (Windows) client is actually also now available free,
from X1.com (of course it's at the expense of a lot of indexing,
but that's supposed to be done in the "background," LOL).

And a worse pain to delete posts that I don't want to store (which is
most of them actually: like this one, they have a short useful life, right?)

Don't you have to tell your other favorite client which messages to delete?
Isn't it equally easy to tell Eudora which messages to delete?
(with the usual "select by range" plus "individual" selections
from the entire message list) -- GUI-wise, the messages are gone
at the moment you delete them; periodic "compact mailbox" operations
are either automatic (when percentage deleted space exceeds
a threshhold) or can be initiated at any time, either
per individual mailbox (one click on message list window)
or "compact all" (which goes pretty fast, even on my 75MB collection,
mainly because it's mostly "In" and "Out" that need compacting,
other mailboxes being generally just appended to).

BTW, since Eudora doesn't do NNTP, it isn't used much with newsgroups :)

I don't like this, BTW - it isn't the way I work. I like to organise my
data in directory trees, with a fair bit of redundancy built in, so that
I work only on copies of original or archived files.

What does "work on" mean? Do you "work on" (edit?) message contents,
or do you mean attachments? If you mean attachments, Eudora
extracts them up front (somewhat opposite to many other clients),
into an "attachments" folder, keeping only the viewable text
(or HTML) in the "mailbox" file. If you like to edit message texts,
Eudora can edit messages -- it actually appends the edited
version to the end of the mailbox when saved, marking the original
as "deleted," yet that original still exists until the mailbox
is next compacted. If you want to save any message
as a separate OS file, that, too is a standard ability.

That may reflect my early experience with DOS and Windows --
I lost some data, and have been paranoid about controlling it my way
ever since. (It's the reason I switched to OS/2 - it not only allowed,
it encouraged that kind of control.)

I believe that Eudora has a very good track record in this regard;
the only time I've ever lost messages is when an innocent-looking
update to "Zone Alarm" corrupted Windows file modification times,
upon which Eudora relies for some integrity checks
(but since I'm also "paranoid," I just recovered my
backed up mail and combined it with the recent new mail,
and then threw out Zone Alarm, losing nothing in the end).

Well, different strokes for different folks. I prefer to have individual
files, and I prefer to Move them to suitable named folders in a suitably
organised tree. Most messages aren't worth keeping, actually, so I don't
accumulate thousands of files.

Perhaps you'd like Opera's integrated email client
(part of its multi-platform browser/email/news/RSS/chat suite),
which stores all messages individually -- however,
file name "52589.mbs" doesn't really tell me much
about a message, and I still have to rely on the
GUI (and contents lists) to manage those messages,
so the underlying physical storage system remains
a bit out of sight in all the clients I've ever used,
ranging from Outlook (one file contains all,
and if it gets corrupted or full, you're SOL)
to Eudora (most flexible thing I've ever used,
where I can do a lot informally "off-line"
that can be accomplished in no other client I know of),
to Opera (where 25,000 RSS feed messages occupy
25,000 individual OS files, in an account-year-month-date
folder tree, wasting 95% of the disk space,
and take an hour to delete).

I was asking, Can you see any given mail without starting Eudora?
Yes -- if you are willing to search through what could become a very
large file, if I understand the mailbox construct correctly.

How do you _find_ "any given mail" to begin with?

If I used Opera I could browse among hordes of individual files
named "52589.mbs" to look for one containing what I want;
using Eudora I can open one mailbox and do one "find"
(for Subject, From, Date, text content, whatever).

But I don't, of course -- I use the email client's abilities.

If I wanted to, I could see any of the mails saved in PMMail
by navigating to the folder in which I've stored them, and
opening them in any text editor, word processor, or browser.

As I can do by opening one mailbox file (not folder) in any
text editor, word processor, or browser, and doing one "find."

Does every message saved by PMMail get automatically saved
in some memorable file name which tells you all about
what it contains? Do you spend time storing every individual
message under such a memorable name yourself, so that you can
recognize the one you want later? If not, how do you later find
the one you want to open and read?

Does any OS automatically sort into file folders
by selected content? -- i.e. using "filters"

By the way, you can edit the "Subject" of incoming Eudora messages
in the mailbox summary listing, without affecting the stored message
(I've never seen such a handy thing anywhere else, as is also the case
with a rather large number of extremely handy little features,
often undiscovered even by long-time users).

Not that I do this: if I decide I want to keep a mail permanently,
I Save it into one of my non-mail data folders, outside PMMail,
under suitable filename.

You can do exactly the same with Eudora, so what then would be
the practical difference between using one or the other?

Personally, I continually create all sorts of memos and lists
and notes, but instead of organizing them as individual OS files
distributed among OS folders, I've always happened to prefer
oganizing them as individual email messages, grouped into mailboxes!

The list of messages (Who, Subject, Date) gives me a lot more
to look at than an OS file list, any message can be
instantly opened and read; several can be opened at a time
(with buttons to switch between them), quick "search"
is always there, so as far as I'm concerned,
the world within the email client
is a slightly better and more navigable world for my
organizing such stuff than the OS world is for me -- oh,
one last neat thing: I can continually hit "send" to fire off
instant simultaneous backups of these just-composed things
to all of my handy and redundant off-site incremental, secure
backup media (otherwise known as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail :)

PMMail has a "bag" for each folder,
which contains the information you've specified to be displayed
in the mail list (eg, read/attachment/date/subject/from/from-address).
It's updated as you add/delete mails from folders. PMMail doesn't
rescan mails, it just displays the data stored in the *.bag.
From your description, this is functionally equivalent to TOC.

Sounds like it.

How Eudora works is interesting. What's most interesting is
how very early decisions about program (and OS) design
become unquestioned ways of doing certain things.

Any mail client with its GUI, however, can serve as somewhat
an "abstraction" layer, making the distinction between
one humongous PST file (Outlook), one file per mailbox/mailfolder
(Eudora, Thunderbird), or one file per message (Opera, PMMail?)
fade somewhat into the background, until Outlook crashes
(at which time one can curse Microsoft's proprietary database),
or other "outside of the box" need arises
(e.g. combining originally separate accounts, recovering
after crashes, remailing all of someone's saved mail to Yahoo),
for which I've found Eudora generally more amenable
to an easy solution than any other client.

If you think I should know more, please continue.

You probably know everything, but I accept any excuse to write :)

"Need more *input*!"
http://imdb.com/title/tt0091949/
http://imdb.com/title/tt0096101/

-[ ]-
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