> Can anyone explain advantages and disadvantages of keeping attachments > in message bodies and in specific directory?
some earlier versions had a bug that when you move a msg to another account, the attachements were not moved. i've been using "store in msg body" for more than 1 year since i realized the above bug, though it might have been fixed, i never tried "store separately" again. the pro is: - it *guarantees* the attachment to move with your msg - in the past there were times i received attachments whose filenames are foreign characters, which generated some funny looking file name on my hard drive, some even failed to open due to this reason. use "in body" solution, the attachment is temporarily stored to the working directory with a 8-digit hex filename only when it is opened, so you never run into the above problem. - better/easier for archive. with "store separately", attachment files lose their original folder/directory and are all put in the <account>/attach directory. cons: - i feel it is slower to navigate in the folder if all attachments are stored in msg body. not very significantly but noticeable. - when you move/copy msgs to another folder/account, it is much slower than "store separately". - it seems the file size is always wrong when you receive a msg with attachment. there is always a couple of hundred byte deviation or so for a 10K file. save it to the disk and you'll see the actual size is different than what you see in msg window side pane (i'm sure i'm looking at the "file size" field, not "size on disk" field). but this doesn't really affect my work/life at all. and, like other people already noted, it "sounds" more risky to store all files in one big msg base, but actually i never saw any file corruption etc and now my msg base is about 1GB. so it is pretty solid. in case you want to switch among the 2 different ways: - from "in body" to "separately": i cannot remember exactly, but i think creating another account, then change the setting to "separately", and drag&drop all msgs from old account to the new one, it should finish this job. - vice versa: i don't think the above method is gonna work on the other direction (or it does, my impression of failure was just caused by the bug in the older version). anyway, use "tools" - "backup", there is an option to allow you to store external files in msg bodies. then restore it. no matter what you do, backup the entire mail directory beforehand to avoid any data loss. such changes to large amount of data might be very risky. -- Samson, using Agent newsreader ________________________________________________ Current version is 2.11.02 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
