Merv,
We recently downsized, and one fellow who was here 22 years lost his
job. He had saved 7 gigabytes of emails!
The problem with email user agents is they have totally unique and
proprietary internal formats.
Formats that are not human readable. I discovered once that not even
thunderbird is guaranteed of knowing the internal format from one
release to another. I lost a lot of valuable email once by upgrading
mozilla. Perhaps they have improved that lately. But eudora
probably cannot interpret files in thunderbird and vice versa, and
Outlook probably would not either.
How does one back up one's email schema? I have no idea. So a hard
disk crash could be fatal. Exporting the mail would see the only
sensible solution. But to what format?
But when a tool stores its info in a database there begins to be hope.
One can write SQL scripts to copy and manipulate the data. MySQL,
for example, exports itself to a number of flat file formats for
backup. And these can be read by later versions of MySQL. Other
databases have that feature as well. I think database technology is
ahead of email agents in general. I back up my databases to flat
files regularly, and burn them on DVD.
The management of spam over the years had driven me crazy - so if one
thinks I am crazy you know who to blame! :)
Thus I am just not an email person. Well, we are off topic, but its
something that affects all of us, thats for sure. I find the ASA
archive frustrating. The answer there is of course
click,click,click,click,click, and so on. I do like forums that have
a "display in printable format" button for a thread. And you then get
the discussion all on one page even if it takes 10 sheets to print.
Not to mention the search capability.
Since you are from kansas...
May I ask, why not try the KCFS.org forums for a while and see how that works?
http://www.kcfs.org/forums
I'd be interested in how an email person views the capabilities
there? (I am asking about functionality - not content). KCFS has
always struck me as progressive in technology.
If you would like to chat privately about the kcfs site please feel
free to email me.
Dave
On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:51 PM, Merv Bitikofer <mrb22667@kansas.net> wrote:
> ...and thanks for your reply too, Mr. Garrison. I hadn't read it till just
> now. I store lots (all) of the ASA email in my Thunderbird inbox, much to
> my wife's amusement. But that is the only way I have of searching it at
> the moment. Then our email crashed and I lost most of it. But you are
> right; that is one solution unless I'm searching back months or years.
>
> --Merv
>
> Preston Garrison wrote:
>>
>> This is why I keep the last 6 months to a year of the list stored in my
>> POP client (Eudora). I wish I had had the hard drive space to keep the last
>> 4 years. Eudora can search that much pretty quickly on a 5 year old Mac
>> laptop. The trouble is that for some reason there are messages that never
>> arrive by e-mail. They appear on the server, but I never get them by e-mail.
>>
>> If someone could figure out how to extract just the From, Date and Subject
>> lines from the stuff on the calvin server and put them in a file, it would
>> be easy to search them in a web browser. If they linked to the messages that
>> would be nice.
>>
>> This could be done, I think, with a fairly simple Perl program, which
>> could be rerun regularly and appended, but i don't know how to write it for
>> Terry. Does someone?
>>
>> Preston G.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Merv,
>>>
>>> This is why most corporations and organizations that have a customer
>>> support knowledge base use a web based tool (with an underlying
>>> database server) instead of an email listserver.
>>> Web based tools and content managers have built in search engines and
>>> word indexing on the content.
>>>
>>> But folks who like email wont use a web based tool.
>>>
>>> I've been talking to Randy a bit about building a wiki for the ASA for
>>> its content. But I have few expectations that the email oriented
>>> people would be motivated to contribute to a wiki. A scholarly wiki
>>> is not for opinion and chat. Try authoring in wikipedia or theopedia
>>> to see what I mean.
>>>
>>> But the recent rush of list members to FaceBook has been encouraging.
>>> People are beginning to see they can use email as a "notifier" but the
>>> content is still on the web.
>>>
>>> If you haven't added me to you FaceBook page (I dont remember at the
>>> moment) , please do so.
>>> :)
>>>
>>
>> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
>> "unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
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>
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Received on Mon Feb 16 18:37:38 2009
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Feb 16 2009 - 18:37:38 EST