Hi All,
On Nov 22, 2008, at 11:43 AM, Anne Robertson wrote:
Hello Arthur,
I hope Esther doesn't mind me pasting in her excellent explanation
from a little while ago on how to use the archives.
Cheers,
Anne
<snip> See the following archived post for the details Anne pasted
in:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg39501.html
Thanks, Anne, for posting instructions on how to use the Mail Archive
web site with access keys. Arthur, the second part to your question
about using the mail archives for searching is that the archives
for our list at the Mail Archive web site are much easier to search
than the archives at the Macvisionaries site. They're also more
complete.
In general, I simply type in search terms, and I'll be shown matches
for posts that contain all those words. For example, if I tabbed to
the search box and typed in:
"specifying time in iTunes"
(without the quotation marks) and pressed return, I'd get 6 matching
links to archived posts that include all those terms, with a short
contextual description including the date and name of the person who
posted. This is like running a Google search on our list archives,
but it's actually more powerful, as I'll describe below.
Navigating through these matches in group mode also works quite well;
you can VO-right to move through links and the context descriptions
(in blocks), and use the control key to cut off descriptions if you're
not interested in them, or (in Leopard) you can VO-Command-H to move
through the links that give the Subject Line.
If you start reading one of these links, you can use the shortcuts
that Anne listed to read the earlier (Control-P for previous) or later
(Control-N for next) discussion posts in the thread. All of this
works extremely well in both Tiger and Leopard. Someone using Tiger
can still easily skip over the contextual descriptions by using the
tab key to move through by subject line and author links, since Tiger
works under group mode navigation of web pages.
It's also easy to modify your search and learn how to run better
searches. For example, if I put in a search, I can check the number of
matches (VO-Command-H takes me to this header). If there are too
many, I can VO-left and interact (VO-Shift-Down Arrow); then try to
add or change some of the search terms.
What makes this search site even more powerful is that you can run
searches according to the author of the post, date range, Boolean
arguments, and wild cards. VO-right to the "Refine Search" link, and
you'll be taken to the description of search syntax in the FAQ. This
gives examples of search arguments you can use. Command-left bracket
to return to your previous page
I usually just type in search terms, or author and search terms. For
example, typing in search terms like:
from:"Anne" change mood message
simply returns Anne's post from this April on how to change Skype mood
messages. I need to type the word "from:" with a lower case "f" and
put a colon after the word. I don't need to put Anne's name in
quotation marks, but I find this to be a good habit for me, because
cases where the name is more than one word long requires the search
string to be enclosed by quotation marks.
When Will asked about not being able to find some of the playlists he
wanted to sync to his Nano 4G earlier today, switched my active
application from Mail to Safari (with Command-tab), then I ran a
search with
from:"Simon" scrolling table nano playlist
After checking the post I wanted to reference, I copied the URL
(Command-L, then Command-C), switched back to Mail (Command-tab), and
pasted (Command-V) the link into my reply.
Hope this gives a sense of how you can use the Mail Archives. Some
list members run Google searches that point to this site. I sometimes
use date range searches, but these have a more exacting syntax. For
example:
from:"David" date:[20080921 TO 20080922] nano blank screen
will give me all posts authored by David (Poehlman) posted between
September 21 and September 22 of this year that contained the words
"nano", "blank", and "screen"
the date field must be typed lowercase "date" following by a colon.
The range must be enclosed by left and right square brackets and use
the format of year-month-day in numbers with four numbers for the year
("2008"), two numbers for the month ("09"), and two numbers for the
day ("21"). The word "TO" must be typed in capital letters. I only
use the date range to search when I really need this.
Finally, the archive at the MacVisionaries site has dropped posts at
the end of months with really heavy posting traffic. The first time
we noticed this happen was March 2007 when iTunes suddenly became
accessible. There were a huge number of posts, and the ones at the
end of the month simply didn't show up in the archives. This has
happened on occasion for a few months since then, so I simply now rely
on the Mail Archives site for our list.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Esther
