Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! On Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:11:15 +0000, Udo Kuhnt wrote: >>> An artificial limit does not offer the user a chance to remedy the >>> situation himself by freeing up additional memory, so it is the most >>> user-unfriendly and thus the worst solution I can think of. >> Even with the limits on the number of messages that can be stored, >> processed, displayed, and accessed in a mailbox, I do not find Arachne >> user-unfriendly. > I regard it as user-unfriendly if a program makes me do something that > I would not do otherwise because it is awkward. Like keeping emails that > belong together in different directories. You may zip up all of your old emails in every mail folder and keep your zipped and archived emails in the same folders where they belong. You may give each of your zipped archive files a name to indicate in which folder they belong. You might want to do that to prevent your becoming confused in case you might inadvertently copy or move any of them to the wrong folder. The Arachne email client program will not process and display any files not having an extension of "CNM, MES, SNT or TBS". Whenever you want to unzip and display the archived messages and without the archived messages getting mixed up with the current messages, all you have to do is to use a simple dos command to rename the extension of the current messages in the folder to something other than "CNM, MES, SNT, TBS, or ZIP". That is what I do and I find doing all that as very easy. >> When a mailbox becomes too filled up with too many >> messages I just archive the old messages simply by zipping them up. >> Doing that conserves my disk space. I may unzip and re-open an old >> archive at any time I want to look for an old message. Easy. >> No problem. > Well, I get hundreds of emails that I have to deal with; most of them > require my to reply to them. Also, I have to search through my sent > mails every now and then, so having them in more directories than > absolutely necessary would make things overly complex. If you zip up and archive your sent emails every now and then you may keep tens of thousands of them archived as zipped files in your sent mail folder. I name my archived sent mail files by a couple of characters indicating the folder in which they belong followed by six characters indicating the date when archived. Easy. > I move old mails > to separate dirs, but only to sort them by topic. "Zipping up" the mails > would only serve to make them less accessible, since disk space is the > least I have to worry about. To access archived emails all you have to do is to rename the extension of the emails currently in the folder and unzip an archived email file. You would presumably remember and have some idea as to the time frame(s) in which you handled some emails about some topics which remain of interest to you and your correspondents. >> I would do the same even if I were using a really bad email program such >> as Outlook. I don't like to see a mailbox having more than about 500 >> messages. It takes too long to page down to a place near the bottom of >> the listing. I have my mailboxes set up to sort by delivery date from >> oldest to most recent with the older messages being at the top. I like >> it that way. Almost all of the messages I am currently dealing with are >> near the bottom. There are a few of my old messages that are important >> enough to refer to in the future for re-reading and review. I move those >> kinds of messages to a separate folder. With Arachne it is very easy to >> organize and sort out my email messages. I do not know of any alternative >> mailer that is easier to use for that purpose. > There are two kinds of typical operations I do on my mail lists; either > I look for older posts by hitting F7, or I jump to the end of the list > to look at recent posts, which is why I also have set up Arachne to > sort them by date. With a limit imposed on the number of mails being > displayed and the mails scattered over several directories, this would > not work. It works just fine for me. > So I am strongly against imposing any artificial limits just to keep > bugs from being triggered. It is the machine that should serve the user, > not the other way round. My machine does serve the user. That is why I greatly prefer using my DOS machine instead of my Window$ machine. It is very hard to search for relevant stuff on a Window$ machine. Window$ machines don't even display the file extensions properly. Another terribly annoying thing that Window$ machines do is that when you click on a file having an uncommon file extension you get asked about what program you want to use to open a file of that file extension type. One of the most terrible things that Window$ machines do is that they will allow you to open a file incorrectly displayed as, for example, "myparty.jpg", and when you click on it it gets opened not with your image file viewer program as you would normally expect. To your great surprise and chagrin, it gets opened with the command processor, because the full and correct name of the file, the name it should have been displayed as, is "myparty.jpg.com". Sam Heywood -- This mail sent via the Arachne Browser, GPL version 1.83 Beta Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --