I'd like to elicit the list's thoughts regarding the PowerMail (under OS X) requirement that attachments stay in one folder in order for the email that contained the attachment to maintain reference. The Finder under OS 9 encountered extreme difficulty managing directories that contained large amounts of files. On some systems a few hundred files would be enough for the Finder to not show all the contents of a folder or otherwise bog down and be unresponsive while in that directory. Also, an alert in an open/save dialog box would appear indicating that the entire contents of the directory would not be displayed when pointed to same. It very well may be true that OS X does not have any of these problems when dealing with very large directories. My very informal testing suggests that you have more problems trying to create a directory with a large number of files than you do with working with them once they are created. (My method was to duplicate my attachments folder and then duplicate its contents a few times until I had over a thousand files. This caused the Finder to go unresponsive twice, requiring it to be relaunched twice.)
Under OS 9 it was possible for a program to keep track of files independent of the filename. For instance, Claris Emailer could keep track of which attachments belonged to which email even if you moved or renamed the attachments. I don't know if this method is available under OS X, or if it is, if Apple is discouraging its use. I'm also not sure that this method is any better than PowerMail's current method. It certainly had its drawbacks, as anyone who moved a Emailer account from one computer to another knows. I'm not advocating any changes, but I do wish to bring this to the attention of the user base in case they are concerned over this requirement. If I move my users over to PowerMail, it will take no time at all for them to have attachments numbering in the thousands. And since filed messages are an ever increasing quantity, (for all practical purposes, I don't live in an ideal world) the number of attachments landing in that one directory is open-ended. This makes browsing for an attachment considerably more problematic. (I am considering making a separate volume just for attachments. With this setup, any dragging of attachments from an email to another directory will be by very nature a copy and not a move. This has some ramifications that need to be explained to users.) One possible solution would be for PowerMail to keep the attachments with the email the way it arrived. Other mail programs do this, in fact, most email programs do this. I suspect this is a non-starter with the PowerMail developers. Since the current method is counter to the norm, they probably have strong convictions about doing it any other way. One ramification of keeping the attachments as part of the message is that the single mail database file would grow alarming large in very short order. One way to fix that is to use separate databases for each filed mail folder, which is also the norm. Consequently, having separate databases for each filed mail folder allows for more practical incremental file backups. I know the PowerMail team has put much thought into these issues. While we may or may not agree with their choices, (and are free to use another program if we don't like them) it would be nice to have an understanding why they chose to do things the way they have in light of the fact that the PowerMail way, at least on the surface appears not to, theoretically speaking, scale well with larger and larger amounts of filed mail. Respectfully, Bob Seaner
