On 9/18/01 10:50 AM, "William Porter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 9/18/01 at 9:57 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Eric Hildum) wrote:
>
>> Actually, I would consider Entourage to be more in conformity with standards
>> and practice than Eudora in this case. Having/requiring a file with an
>> ambiguous file type (TEXT) as Eudora does is not consistent with the
>> expected Macintosh user experience.
>
> Eric,
>
> There are lots of things about Eudora that I would agree are "not consistent
> with the expected Macintosh user experience," but the fact that it stores its
> mailboxes as text files does not seem to be one of them. I do not understand
> what's "ambiguous" about the file type TEXT, and it has the advantage of being
> non-proprietary, unlike OPIM.
You're confusing two issues. OPIM is Entourage's _creator_ code, not the
file type. The creator code is not the problem. The file type Entourage uses
is MBOX, whereas the file type Eudora wants is TEXT. Yes, it is a text file,
but of a very special type. If you try importing 1 million other TEXT files
into Eudora, which don't happen to be constructed as mbox format but are
just plain old text files, or BBEdit files, or BinHex files, all of which
are TEXT files, it won't work. That's what's ambiguous. Since the only type
of text file that works is one in MBOX format, it should be honest and say
that it wants MBOX files. Entourage does the right thing by not being vague,
but precise. Entourage has now done all the work to make exporting into a
common standard format. If the Eudora developers want to make it easy for
users to switch to Eudora (as you'd think they would), they should specify,
or at least allow, the proper MBOX filer type to be recognized. Go complain
on the Eudora mailing list. This is the wrong place.
>
> I'm a database developer. The programming resources that make my applications
> work belong to me and I protect them as jealously as I can. But the data that
> my
> users put into my applications belongs to them, and I work hard to make it as
> easy for them to get it out as possible. It's certainly easy to drag a mailbox
> to the desktop, but if you can't do anything with it then without opening
> ResEdit, well, what's the point?
>
> I don't mean to be combative. If I'm missing something here, I will be
> genuinely
> grateful if someone could point it out.
>
I hope I did.
--
Paul Berkowitz
--
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To search the archives:
<http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
