Re: email question (was The HTML Experiment)

[Ron Ebert <ebert@citrus.ucr.edu>]

At 09:04 PM 6/17/98 -0700, James Mclean wrote:
> As long as there's a discussion about email program choices...
>
> Both Netscape email and Eudora seem to have one serious problem - but
> perhaps there's a solution someone could tell me about.
>
> I read my mail from both my office and my home.  I am not always able to
> read all my mail at a single sitting, and I often want to leave messages
> sitting there so that I can reply later.  I imagine that this is very
> common.
>
> Since these mailers both download all the email to local disk before
> reading, I am left with two options:
> 1) Leave a copy of the emails on the central computer, and when I am done
> reading go into another mailer on the central computer and delete the ones
> I have just read... if I can remember which ones they were.
> 2) Don't leave a copy on the central computer, and have saved emails
> stashed randomly about in computers that cannot reach one another.
>
> Neither of these options is the least bit desirable.  Is there a solution?

Yes, at least for Eudora. I've never used Netscape and can't say whether
this idea will work with it. Eudora stores its e-mails in two files for
each mailbox. They end in .mbx and .toc. If you go into the Eudora folder
on your PC, you will see files that have these extensions, e.g. in.mbx and
in.toc. [BTW, they stand for mailbox (.mbx) and table of contents (.toc).]
If you wanted to copy all of the e-mails that are sitting in your in-box to
take home to read at your leisure, you'd copy in.mbx and in.toc to a
diskette, and then install these files to your Eudora folder at home.

The way I do it to keep track of things is to use my work computer as my
main archive storage medium. I place e-mails that I want to save in their
own mailboxes - e.g., I have one for this list I call Phys-L. At the end of
the week, I copy all my mailbox files, such as Phys-L.mbx and Phys-L.toc,
to diskettes and take them home to install on my home computer. This lets
me read them at home if I want to and also serves as a backup better than
most - a fire in my lab may trash my computer, but the copies are at a
different physical location.

When I want to pull mail off the campus server from home, I call in and get
them. After reading through them, all those I want to save I place in a
unique mailbox - UCR-Transfer. Sunday evening I copy ucr-tran.mbx and
ucr-tran.toc to a diskette and take them to work Monday morning. I copy
these files into my work computer's Eudora folder, and I then move the
e-mails to which ever mailboxes they belong on my work computer. Everything
is neat, tidy, in order, and nothing is ever left on my campus server.


Ron Ebert
ron.ebert@ucr.edu
http://phyld.ucr.edu/
*******************
The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they
have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact. -John
Tyndall