Email client wish list

Firstly, I really like Geoff Odhner's suggestion that mail headers be
editable without deleting the original. Some sort of versioning of those
changes would be great.

My big wish list is an easy way to archive email by date. Some sort of
automatic export into yearly or monthly archive files which are viewable but
don't slow down your whole database. Something like a .PST file in Outlook,
but searchable from Spotlight and accessible, but not necessary loaded every
time you run your email client.

--Nik

Apple's Mail did not allow me to archive or save messages the way I wanted to ... so I wrote Mail Saver. It's posted at VersionTracker: [Download] It's shareware with a 30 day demo period. Allows you plenty of time to try it.

On Oct 26, 2006, at 13:14, Nik wrote:
> My big wish list is an easy way to archive email by date. Some sort of
> automatic export into yearly or monthly archive files which are
> viewable but
> don't slow down your whole database. Something like a .PST file in
> Outlook,
> but searchable from Spotlight and accessible, but not necessary
> loaded every
> time you run your email client.

This is exactly what Eudora's mailboxes do. Only the In, Out, and
Trash boxes are loaded into memory all the time (actually, just their
tables of contents); others are only loaded when you actually access
them. Otherwise, they just sit there in the menu or list waiting for
your attention. My Eudora installation has around 3 million messages
spread across hundreds of mailboxes, and yet, Eudora operates just as
though it were a fresh installation. And when you do open those
mailboxes, things still don't slow down - tossing around multiple
mailboxes with 32k messages each is no problem. Spotlight searches
work but are limited to the mailbox level for results; however, since
Eudora can usually search them much faster, anyway, the poor
Spotlight support isn't an issue.

And don't forget that you can have mailboxes outside the Eudora
folder. They can be stored on a CD, a server, whatever, and when you
need to open them for retrieving a message or for searching, you just
double-click on them and Eudora opens them and temporarily adds them
to its mailbox list. It's much like opening a document in a word
processor. You can even have filters that point to such mailboxes, so
that if you, say, periodically need to open a friend's In box and
filter some of your messages into it, it becomes a trivial task.
(I've never tried it, but I can see this feature being used to
provide a manual message syncing mechanism between computers.)

The only thing missing from your request is a method to automatically
move messages on a periodic basis to dated mailboxes. However, I
believe there are programs out there that can do that for you, and
I'm sure it can be done in AppleScript by someone better than me at
writing such scripts. Since the mailboxes are just text files, you
could also easily use something like Perl to do the job. If worse
comes to worse, you can do it manually with just a few minutes of
time each session, as I've done many times for my monthly archives.


Regards,
Bob

Good evening,

On 26/10/06 at 1:14 PM -0700, Nik <gerberinik.net> wrote:

>My big wish list is an easy way to archive email by date. Some sort of
>automatic export into yearly or monthly archive files which are viewable but
>don't slow down your whole database. Something like a .PST file in Outlook,

Email Archiver does just that; it archives messages to
date-stamped mailboxes. But the current version does not export
messages, they are archived within the mail program. Also, the
current version only supports Mailsmith. A version which
supports Mail and Eudora as well external exports is planned.

<http://www.garrison.com.au/freeware/emailarchiver.html>

--
    Charlie Garrison <garrisonzeta.org.au>
    PO Box 141, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

On 26 Oct 2006, at 14:14 , Nik wrote:
> My big wish list is an easy way to archive email by date.

The best way to do that though, I think, is on the server.

I use procmail to sort all mail into <listname>.YYYY-MM mailboxes.
On my wife's email, I sort all her incoming unsorted mail into INBOX/
yyyy-mm mailboxes

Decent IMAP support on the other end and Bob's your uncle.

Seriously, there are some thing that are better done on the server
side, and automated sorting is one of them. Spam tagging/rejecting
is, of course, the other.


[OK, enough answering what's already been posted - any new wishes? -Adam]

I'd like clients to support the external editor suite of Apple
events, much like FTP clients do. Then, when the client's own text
editor just doesn't cut it for the task at hand, I could very easily
select an Edit in Foo command to edit the message in a Real Text
Editor, like BBEdit. I have this functionality to some extent in
Cocoa applications thanks to a hacked-together input manager, but
direct, official support would be much better.

(As an aside, this closely relates to one of Eudora's biggest
shortcomings in the area of basics: lack of even rudimentary search-
and-replace.)


Regards,
Bob

At 09:51 -0700 UTC, on 2006-10-28, Bob Williams wrote:

[...]

> (As an aside, this closely relates to one of Eudora's biggest
> shortcomings in the area of basics: lack of even rudimentary search-
> and-replace.)

I've added *rudimentary* search & replace with a liitle AS script. Available
at <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/downloads/EudoraSearchReplace.sit>
(Definitely rudimentary though.)


--
<http://www.greenmyapple.org/>