TidBITS#760/20-Dec-04
=====================
We're wrapping up 2004 with an announcement of changes coming
in 2005. Read on for important news about our upcoming mailing
list migration, as well as a peek at where you can find some
of us at Macworld Expo San Francisco 2005. Also in this issue,
Adam harnesses a little-used feature in Eudora to manage his
increasing email load, and Apple releases the Mac OS X 10.3.7
update. Our next issue will be 10-Jan-05; happy holidays!
Topics:
MailBITS/20-Dec-04
Important News for All Subscribers: Mailing List Migration
DealBITS Drawing: GarageSale
AirPort Firmware Updates Fix Major Bugs
Macworld Expo SF 2005 Events
A New Way to Use Eudora
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/20-Dec-04
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-760.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2004/TidBITS#760_20-Dec-04.etx>
Copyright 2004 TidBITS: Reuse governed by Creative Commons license
<http://www.tidbits.com/terms/> Contact: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* READERS LIKE YOU! Help keep TidBITS great via our voluntary <------ NEW!
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<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
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* StuffIt Deluxe 9 from Allume Systems improves on the Mac's
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Upgrade for only $29.99! <http://www.stuffit.com/mac/deluxe/>
* Bare Bones Software BBEdit 8.0 -- More than 100 new features <----- NEW!
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* easyDNS: Worried about your ISP going under? Get lifetime email <-- NEW!
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---------------------------------------------------------------
MailBITS/20-Dec-04
------------------
**TidBITS 2004 Holiday Break** -- You're reading the final TidBITS
issue for 2004. Our next issue will arrive 10-Jan-05, as we gear
up for Macworld Expo in San Francisco. We hope to enjoy some
well-deserved rest and relaxation with family and friends in
the meantime, and although I plan to be working on our server
infrastructure during the break, it's entirely likely that
email and our various non-issue services like TidBITS Talk
and ExtraBITS will mostly slumber through the next few weeks.
With a chance for reflection provided by this vantage point at the
end of the year, I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks to the
people without whom TidBITS couldn't exist: Tonya, Geoff, Jeff,
Matt, Glenn, and Mark; our corporate sponsors and Internet hosts;
the generous individuals who have written articles for TidBITS
or contributed financially; our selfless volunteer translators;
the folks who keep TidBITS Talk humming along; readers of our
Take Control ebooks; and of course, everyone who gives meaning
to our work by actually reading the words we send down the wires
each week in TidBITS.
My wish for the new year is that 2005 will be brought to you by
the letter C, in that I hope to see civility, candor, cooperation
(for positive goals rather than against a common enemy, real or
imagined), and consideration (of other individuals and of future
consequences) become increasingly practiced, encouraged, and
expected. [ACE]
**Mac OS 10.3.7 Fixes Specific Bugs** -- Apple has released
Mac OS X 10.3.7, a less-sweeping update than most of the previous
Mac OS X 10.3 updates. Unlike those updates, this one focuses on
specific bugs, fixing a problem that could cause intermittent DNS
lookup failures, enabling TextEdit to open certain previously
problematic RTF documents, solving a few problems for the World
of Warcraft game, improving compatibility for 3D surfaces in
Graphing Calculator, fixing the problem introduced in 10.3.6
that prevented some FireWire drives from mounting, addressing
an issue that caused filenames saved to an AppleShare file server
to be shortened to 31 character, improving compatibility with
FireWire-based audio devices, and enabling E*Trade PDF account
statements to be viewed in Preview, among others.
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300385>
Note that Apple specifically recommends you disconnect FireWire
drives (including iPods!) before installing the update, and there
have been reports at various Mac Web sites of network-related
performance problems after updating. Although we haven't seen
problems, you may wish to delay installing 10.3.7 until more
is known, unless you're experiencing problems with something
the update explicitly fixes. Mac OS X 10.3.7 is a 26 MB update
available via Software Update or as a standalone installer;
a combo update that includes all the changes since 10.3 is
available as a 97 MB download. [ACE]
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxupdate_10_3_7.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/macosxcombinedupdate_10_3_7.html>
<http://www.macfixit.com/>
<http://www.macintouch.com/panreader48.html#dec20>
Important News for All Subscribers: Mailing List Migration
----------------------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I hate to introduce an article in such a blatant way, but please
read everything that follows, since it explains some sweeping
changes we're making that will affect your subscription to
TidBITS.
Over the holiday break, if everything goes well, we plan to take
the next major step in the migration of our server infrastructure
to Web Crossing: the transition of the four primary TidBITS
mailing lists from our increasingly creaky Power Mac 7100,
with its obsolete 1997 version of ListSTAR running under
Mac OS 8.6. The system has served us well and provided some
unique capabilities, but we're spending too much time propping
it up. Also retiring in the transition will be our FileMaker-
based subscription database that has tracked subscribers behind
the scenes since 1996; although it, too, offered useful and
unique features, it doesn't integrate with the functionality
that Web Crossing provides.
**TidBITS Accounts** -- The most significant aspect of the move
to Web Crossing is that every subscriber will receive a TidBITS
account in Web Crossing, complete with a user name and password
that you can use to log in and change your email address, manage
your subscriptions to all of our mailing lists, and set a variety
of preferences. In the past, if you wanted to change your email
address, you had to unsubscribe from the old address (a often-
impossible task for people who had already switched to the new
address) and resubscribe from the new address. Worse, since it's
entirely common for people to subscribe to several of our lists
(TidBITS, TidBITS Talk, Take Control Announcements, etc.), that
process had to be repeated separately for each list.
In the future, I anticipate creating additional services that
revolve around your TidBITS account. For instance, to enter
a DealBITS drawing now requires that you enter your real name
and email address. It would be simple for me to have that form
automatically pre-fill itself if you loaded the page while logged
in. (By default, Web Crossing remembers that you're logged in
via a cookie; if you delete your cookies or turn off cookies
entirely, you'll have to log in anew the next time you want
to access a non-public page.)
In fact, that's one of the truly neat things about Web Crossing -
every object has an access list that determines who can do what to
the object. So, for instance, I could set up a commenting feature
that was readable by everyone, but only accepted submissions from
those subscribed to the list. TidBITS Talk was set this way until
recently as a way of keeping spam and worms out of the moderation
queue; Postini has eliminated enough of the spam and worms such
that I've recently been able to allow submissions from email
addresses that aren't subscribed to the list.
When I actually add your address to the Web Crossing-based
TidBITS list (and this will be true whether you subscribe
to the full issue in text or HTML, or if you get the text or
HTML announcement), you will receive an email message from me,
generated automatically by Web Crossing. It's a standard
welcome message, with one important difference. If you have
never subscribed to one of our lists in Web Crossing before,
the server will create a TidBITS account for you and include
your user name and a temporary password at the top of that
welcome message. In cases where no one else already has that
user name, your user name will match your email user name; in
duplicate situations, Web Crossing will append a random number
to your email user name. Don't worry if the user name isn't what
you'd like; you can change it to anything you like, even your
real name with a space between the first and last names. Also,
Web Crossing should accept your full email address in lieu of
your user name in most places.
The temporary password that you'll receive is generated randomly,
and the first time you log in, Web Crossing asks you to change it
to something reasonable that you'll remember. If you ever forget
your user name or password, there's a Problems Logging In link on
every Web Crossing login screen that you can use to request a new
temporary password, sent to the email address currently stored
with your TidBITS account. For a brief set of instructions for
the basic tasks I anticipate, visit the TidBITS Account Help page
linked below. I'll add to it with any additional help we develop.
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/account-help.html>
What if you are currently subscribed to TidBITS Talk or Take
Control Announcements? Then you already have a TidBITS account,
and you should have already received your user name and password
in a list welcome message. If, as is easily imaginable, that
welcome message was eaten by an errant spam filter, lost, or
accidentally deleted, follow the instructions on our TidBITS
Account Help page above to retrieve your information.
An account can have only one email address associated with it,
so please do not create additional accounts unless you know
that you want to subscribe to our various mailing lists using
different email addresses. If you do end up with multiple accounts
accidentally, it would be most elegant and efficient to subscribe
the desired one to the lists you want and delete the unwanted
account. At the moment, I'm the only one who can delete an
account, but I hope to provide an option in the preferences
so people can delete their own unwanted accounts.
**What to Expect, What to Do** -- So, if all goes well, at some
point before we publish the next issue of TidBITS (which will be
the 10-Jan-05 issue), you can expect to receive a welcome message
from <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, sent to the address at which you currently
receive your TidBITS subscription. Make sure that message can
avoid your spam filters.
I also encourage you to log in to our server using your user name
and temporary password; you'll have to change the password on that
first login, and it's a good way to make sure you can remember
the password for the future. Feel free to explore the available
preferences, accessible at the link below; I'll also make the
preferences link available in our standard navigation bar.
However, you do not need to log in to continue receiving TidBITS;
although a good idea for the future, it is optional for now.
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/webx?25@@.bebc200!tz=300>
One minor change you can expect revolves around the headers in
TidBITS issues. Although they will remain the same for the most
part, you'll see a few new ones and a few others may change or
disappear. Overall, I expect few people to notice or care about
the header changes, although it's possible some spam filters may
be confused briefly; be sure to check your Junk folder or
quarantine if issues don't appear on schedule.
Also changing will be our email addresses for subscription
management. The classic -on and -off addresses will be deprecated
(which doesn't make me at all sad, given that the vast majority
of the traffic they receive is spam that clogs up our subscription
system and can unsubscribe readers automatically). Although there
will be an email option for managing subscriptions, I'd rather
encourage people to use our Web-based subscription form.
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/list.html>
Please bear with me if anything goes wrong. Given the size of
our mailing lists, this migration is a major high-wire act for me,
and although I've moved smaller lists in the past with no trouble,
I can't predict exactly what might happen. Rest assured that if
something does break in a big way, I'll know about it and will
be in my own private hell, so just sit tight and wait for news
on ExtraBITS, in direct email, or in the next issue of TidBITS.
Cross your fingers!
<http://www.tidbits.com/ExtraBITS/>
**Executive Summary** -- Can you tell I'm a bit paranoid about
moving tens of thousands of TidBITS subscriptions? To summarize
everything above:
* You'll receive an email message from me containing your account
information.
* You do not need to log in right away, but if you do, you will
have to change your password to something you'll remember.
* If you have troubles, check the TidBITS Account Help page,
and if that doesn't help, contact me.
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/account-help.html>
DealBITS Drawing: GarageSale
----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back when we moved from Seattle to Ithaca, NY, we tried selling
some items on eBay, and although it wasn't terribly difficult to
set up an auction or two, it quickly became clear that working
through eBay's Web-based interface required more effort than we
were willing to expend on a regular basis. Now, however, there's
no need to suffer through an awkward Web-based interface, and the
next time I think of selling something on eBay, I plan to try
GarageSale, from iwascoding.com. Put simply, GarageSale is a full
Mac OS X application that acts as a front-end for people posting
auctions on eBay. It integrates with iPhoto for pictures, offers
real text-editing tools, lets you create and use templates for
your auctions, and helps you track your auctions after the fact.
<http://www.iwascoding.com/GarageSale/>
In this week's DealBITS drawing, you can enter to win one of three
copies of GarageSale (the 5-machine Family Pack license), each
worth $44.99. Entrants who aren't among our lucky winners will
receive a discount on GarageSale (both the single-user and Family
Pack license), so if you'd like a program to ease the process
of posting an auction on eBay, be sure to enter at the DealBITS
page linked below. All information gathered is covered by our
comprehensive privacy policy. Be careful with your spam filters,
since you must be able to receive email from my address to learn
if you've won.
<http://www.tidbits.com/dealbits/iwascoding/>
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/privacy.html>
Because of the holiday break, you can enter through 03-Jan-05;
we'll announce the winners that week and in the following issue
of TidBITS.
AirPort Firmware Updates Fix Major Bugs
---------------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Apple late today pushed out two incremental firmware releases to
its wireless base stations, AirPort Express 6.1.1 and AirPort
Extreme 5.5.1, on the heels of a major release a few weeks ago
(see "AirPort 4.1 Fixes Encryption Irritation, Enables Remote
Control" in TidBITS-756_). These incremental fixes should finally
address a perplexing and persistent problem with making reliable
FTP connections across either AirPort Express or Extreme networks.
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/
airportextremefirmware551formacosx.html>
<http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/
airportexpressfirmware611formacosx.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07897>
The release notes for both firmware updates have four items in
common.
* FTP: This maddening problem meant that many users could not
reliably perform FTP transactions across an Apple base station.
Maddening is the most publishable word. The bug has been fixed,
apparently; I was unable to test it before this article went
to press.
* Hard Reset: The base stations now tell you when you've held down
the reset button long enough to trigger a hard reset, which wipes
all resident settings. (The behavior varies slightly between the
AirPort Extreme and Express base stations for soft, hard, and
factory resets.) After five seconds of holding down the reset
button, both base station models flash their LEDs rapidly to
indicate that the command was received.
* WDS with WPA: It sounds like gibberish, but this is a method
of using the latest security for encrypting a Wi-Fi network
(WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access) with wireless connections between
base stations. The previous major firmware upgrade allowed WPA to
work with wireless distribution system (WDS); this micro-release
fixes a bug that would cause a base station to crash eventually
when a WDS node was removed.
* Printers: Some printers wouldn't work with the base station
printing sharing after the previous major firmware release was
installed. This micro-release reportedly fixes that problem.
* PPPoE: Finally, some PPPoE setups were garbled on AirPort
Extreme Base Stations after the previous major release was
installed. This release also supposedly resolves that problem.
Macworld Expo SF 2005 Events
----------------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco approaches, though it's
a bit later than normal this year, with the show floor open from
11-Jan-05 through 14-Jan-05. At the moment, short of the long-
running Netters Dinner, I'm unaware of any public events after
the show hours, although I'm sure some will be supplementing the
private parties that go on every year. As usual, Ilene Hoffman's
Hess Events List is collecting events, and although it's pretty
sparse right now, check it out as the show date draws nearer.
<http://www.ilenesmachine.com/partylist.shtml>
The Netter's Dinner, scheduled for Thursday, January 13th, is now
in its 19th consecutive year. For those who like tradition, the
Netter's Dinner is ideal, since it will once again be held at the
Hunan at Sansome and Broadway, where the hot and spicy Chinese
dinner (vegetarian dishes are available) usually costs $18. You
must register by 11-Jan-04 via Kagi - check the link below soon
for the final cost and registration details. The booming voice
and Hawaiian shirt of our fearless organizer, Jon Pugh, will
again be absent, so I'll once more be moderating the boisterous
raise-your-hands survey. Help me avoid sounding unprepared on
stage by sending suggestions for questions ahead of time, and
when you're shouting from the audience, yell loudly!
<http://www.seanet.com/~jonpugh/nettersdinner.html>
As in previous years, meet at the top of the escalators on the
south side of Moscone at 6:00 PM and be prepared for a brisk,
sometimes damp, walk that snarls traffic throughout downtown San
Francisco. We'll leave no later than 6:30 PM for the restaurant.
**TidBITS/Take Control Events** -- The Netter's Dinner is purely
for social networking and fun, but we're giving plenty of events
where you can learn something and have your questions answered
seriously. Managing Editor Jeff Carlson and I will be at the show,
along with a smattering of Take Control authors. Here's a cheat
sheet to where you can find us. Do say hello, bring any questions
you may have, and let us know what you're thinking about our work.
* Tuesday, 11-Jan-05, offers a pair of Take Control presentations.
From noon to 1:00 PM, I'll be giving a presentation about Take
Control in general and how to buy a Mac at the Allume Systems
booth (#1507), hopefully spicing it up with examples of hot new
products from Steve Jobs's keynote earlier that day. Then, at
1:00 PM, Tom Negrino will take over for me at the Allume booth
and talk about Microsoft Entourage 2004. Finally, at 3:00 PM,
Jeff Carlson will give an iMovie presentation at the Peachpit
booth (#1807) and sign copies of his two iMovie books.
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/buying-mac.html>
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/entourage-2004.html>
<http://www.necoffee.com/imovievqs/>
* Wednesday, 12-Jan-05, promises to be a packed day. From noon
to 1:00 PM, I'll be in the User Group Lounge (room #252) to talk
about TidBITS, Take Control, announcements at the show, and any
other topics that come up. It's always a good time, and I raffle
off a couple of CDs containing the full Take Control library, so
be sure to stop in... unless you'd prefer to listen to Joe Kissell
talk about backups in Mac OS X, also from noon to 1:00 PM, but
at the Allume booth (#1507). From 1:15 PM to 2:30 PM, I'm giving
my now-traditional Macworld Users Conference talk about getting
started with iPhoto (which, true to form, will probably have just
been updated). And then at 3:00 PM, I'll be participating in the
tie-breaker for the MacBrainiac Challenge, a team-based quiz
show event run by Macworld's Chris Breen. Joining me will be
Andy Ihnatko, Dan Frakes, and Rich Siegel, and I can guarantee
that it will be loads of fun.
<http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/events/20SFO05A/conference/tracksessions/
Digital+Tools/QMONYA04MYNH>
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/backup-macosx.html>
<http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/events/20SFO05A/keynotes>
* On Thursday, 13-Jan-05, Joe will be back at the Allume booth
(#1507) to answer your questions about Apple Mail from noon to
1:00 PM. Then, from 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM, I'll be at the Peachpit
booth (#1807) to do a Q&A session about wireless networking based
on my experiences writing The Wireless Networking Starter Kit,
Second Edition. Bring your questions and I'll see how many I
can answer in half an hour.
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/email-apple-mail.html>
<http://wireless-starter-kit.com/>
A New Way to Use Eudora
-----------------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
A few months ago, I was ruminating on how email programs do
a fine job of helping users send and receive mail, but do
little for helping users manage their mail. It's an important
distinction; the basics of creating, addressing, writing, and
sending an email message are relatively simple, as are the
essential aspects of displaying an incoming message and filing
it (either manually or automatically via filters) in a mailbox
to be deleted or saved for future reference. But generally
ignored are the tasks that users constantly perform with their
email: scanning unread mail for important messages, keeping
certain messages in front until they've been dealt with,
organizing mail in a variety of different ways, and referring
back to discussions for information or attachments.
Right now, Microsoft Entourage 2004 does the best job of any
Macintosh email program of helping users manage their mail,
thanks to its categories, flags, and custom views. And Creo's
Six Degrees, now owned by Ralston Technology Group and called
Clarity, offers helpful mail management features, though outside
of your email client. But I'm uninterested in trusting my 2.2 GB
of stored mail to Entourage's single-file database, and there are
too many little features of Eudora that I've grown to rely on over
the years to switch email programs or work outside Eudora at this
point. So, I had to figure out how to make Eudora help me manage
my mail here and now, with the features it currently has.
<http://www.eudora.com/>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/entourage2004/entourage2004.aspx>
<http://www.ralstontech.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07689>
**Saved Search Confusion** -- Perhaps the least used of Eudora's
powerful features are saved searches. They've existed in Eudora
for years, and with them, you can set up a search with multiple
criteria to run across an arbitrary set of mailboxes and then
save it for later use. (Set up and run a search, and when you're
looking at the search results window, choose File > Save. Give the
search a name, and store it in the Search Folder in your Eudora
Folder - that's the default location - and from then on, you can
invoke the search by choosing it from the hierarchical Special >
Find menu.)
The problem with saved searches, I believe, is that no one thinks
they want to save a search - you use a search to find that message
from your boss back in April telling you not to work on the
Accounting Department's favorite waste-of-time project, but once
you've found that message and used it to justify why you hadn't
been attending meetings with the programmers from Accounting,
you aren't likely to need it again. So why save the search?
The reason is because the result of a saved search is a Eudora
mailbox window with an extra column that tells you which mailbox
each message lives in. Anything you can do in a mailbox window,
you can do in a search results window. In other words, a search
results window is another, completely flexible, way of looking
at your mail. Think of a saved search as a custom mailbox.
Once you make that mental leap, I think you'll start to see
how saved searches can help. But first, let me explain what
I want to find with my saved search.
**Out of Sight, Out of Mind** -- I've learned over the years
that if I can't see something, I'll forget about it. That's an
exaggeration, of course, but in situations where many items need
attention, those that force themselves into my field of view
are the ones I handle.
I receive several hundred non-spam messages every day. They break
down into a few rough categories: automated messages that can
be deleted after a glance at the Subject line, mail from TidBITS
staff and Take Control authors, mail from close friends and
family, messages to mailing lists, and mail from people I either
don't know or don't correspond with on a daily basis. Over the
years, I've set up mailboxes and filters to separate out messages
in all but the last category into individual mailboxes. That way,
important messages from Tonya or Geoff aren't buried in my In box
under random offers from Amazon and other shopping sites, mail
regarding my latest TidBITS article, and so on. Similarly, all
mailing lists are nicely separated out into their own mailboxes.
In the past, I worked around the out-of-sight problem by setting
Eudora to open a window for each mailbox that received new mail.
So, I'd check mail, Eudora would open 10 or 15 mailbox windows,
and I'd look at the bottom of each for new messages, deal with
them, and then close the mailbox to indicate I was done with it.
If I needed to keep a message as a reminder to do something later,
I'd leave it open in its own window until I was done with it.
This technique, while it served me well for many years, was
starting to break down. I had too many mailboxes that could be
open at any one time, and too many individual messages in their
own windows - the window clutter was driving me crazy. Worse,
if I moved my Eudora Folder to my PowerBook for a trip, or if
a beta of Eudora crashed, all those open windows could be closed,
and I would have absolutely no idea which messages were important.
So filtered mail wasn't being tracked as well as it could be.
Also problematic was my In box, which has fluctuated between 700
and 1,200 messages over the last few years. Most of the time it
would grow slowly, as new mail pushed older messages up and out
of sight, and periodically (on long plane trips, in particular)
I would beat it back down by filing or replying to messages that
I'd missed. The fact that my In box always contained about 1,000
messages was indication enough that my approach to mail I couldn't
filter also wasn't working.
**The Solution** -- I realized that my filtering was working
properly, in that it was putting messages in folders where I could
easily find them later without needing to search. That's actually
important, since there are times I can't think of a good search
term easily. For instance, if Tonya asks me about the billing
status of a DealBITS sponsor, I may need to scan through the
Sponsors mailbox until I recognize the name of the person
associated with that company, Option-click the person's name
to gather all the messages from them, and then scan through
the concentrated content in Eudora's preview pane until I see
what I need to know.
Where my system wasn't working was in the presentation of new
messages, which required a new window to display every mailbox
containing at least a single message, and in the tracking of
messages that required further action, which merely added to the
window clutter. I needed a custom mailbox - a saved search - that
would help me focus on unread mail across all my mailboxes and
those messages I wanted to flag for future action.
I created a new search, and in the Mailboxes tab, I selected
the 33 mailboxes that could receive new messages from individuals
(not mailing lists) via a filter (Command-click to select multiple
mailboxes). Then I set the search criteria to find messages whose
status was unread and messages with a custom label I called "Check
Out." I ran the search and looked at the results. Eudora had found
the right messages, but they weren't in a useful order. So I
clicked the Mailbox column header to sort the results by mailbox,
then I Shift-clicked the Date column header to sort by date within
mailbox. Lastly, I chose Special > Sort > Group Subjects so
messages with the same Subject header would sort together,
regardless of their mailbox or date. This last bit is actually
quite important, since it keeps together discussions between
people who have their own mailbox, like Tonya, and those who
don't and thus end up in my In box. Once I had everything right,
I saved the search.
Since choosing a menu item from a hierarchical menu is too much
work for regular use, I Command-clicked the empty spot at the top
of Eudora's toolbar and created a button that invoked my saved
search. I use my function keys for launching applications, so I
couldn't use Eudora's built-in way of mapping the function keys
to toolbar buttons, so I instead created an iKey shortcut that
invoked my saved search when I pressed Command-1, the hotkey that
normally opens the In box in Eudora. Now I could press Command-1
or click the toolbar button any time I wanted to see messages
that needed attention, either because they were unread or because
I had read them and assigned them the Check Out label.
<http://www.scriptsoftware.com/ikey/>
Of course, this technique was possible only because Eudora can
search for such messages across 33 mailboxes and display the
results in about 1 second. But two new features in Eudora 6.2
made it work even better. Now, new messages that come in during
a mail check are automatically added to open search results
windows, meaning that I don't have to re-run the saved search
for it to find new messages. Also, previous versions of Eudora
didn't save the custom sort order for a saved search, whereas
6.2 does.
The way I read mail works a bit differently now. I scan the
list of new and labeled messages and read those that seem most
important. When I'm done with reading (and replying to, if
necessary) a message, how I deal with it depends on where it
lives. If it has already been filtered into a mailbox, I just
close its window, thus marking it as read so it won't show up
the next time I run the saved search. (I save essentially all
mail these days; disk space is cheap and the occasional times
I need to refer back to seemingly unimportant messages makes
saving all mail worthwhile.) For messages that aren't filtered
and thus come from my In box, I either delete the message
(thus storing it permanently in my Trash mailbox for the year;
I start a new one every year) or file it in the appropriate
mailbox. Either way, the message is marked as read and won't
appear in future runs of the saved search. If I deal with a
message labeled Check Out, I click a toolbar button that changes
its label to Done; if necessary, I also file it at that point.
The main problem with this approach that I've had to work around
is that unread messages are more annoying than messages flagged
with the Check Out label, so I'm more likely to deal with them
than the labeled messages. As a result, I often read a message,
decide I don't want to deal with it right then, and mark it unread
again to reduce my ability to ignore it later. I've created
an iKey shortcut to mark the message as unread and close it
so I can easily close message windows and not lose their unread
status. (Even still, I have to check my In box every so often
for the occasional message that was marked as read but not filed
or deleted.)
That said, I'm amazed at my subconscious ability to ignore
messages that I don't want to deal with for some reason,
usually because doing so will be either time-consuming,
unpleasant, or simply something I don't want to do all that
badly. Keeping them visible in my custom mailbox isn't a perfect
solution, but it's better than my previous approach, which all
but guaranteed they'd be lost until at least my next cross-
country plane trip.
**Caveats** -- A few caveats apply. I'm sure there are people out
there who can't imagine why all this fuss and bother is necessary,
because they don't receive that much mail. If you receive only
10 to 20 messages per day, for instance, there's no reason to
go beyond the basics in any email program (and in fact, any
email program will work fine).
Also, I've implemented this technique in Eudora because that's
what I use, but hopefully those of you who use other email
programs can see the principles I've applied and translate them
to whatever features your preferred email program offers.
Note that mailing lists aren't part of this system. That's because
the open mailbox window approach still works better with mailing
lists for me. I often go days between reading messages from a
list, so the open window is a good reminder that there may be
something interesting. And I seldom want to flag a message from
a list for later action, although I could create another saved
search to find labeled items from a set of mailing list mailboxes.
Lastly, I won't pretend that this technique is the best possible
way to manage email. It's a stopgap measure that works with the
tools I have available today. But there are many ways email
programs could do a significantly better job of managing mail
for us automatically, and if we users start talking about how
email programs can help us manage mail more efficiently, perhaps
email developers will start giving more attention to simplifying
the actual tasks we perform day in and day out.
Hot Topics in TidBITS Talk/20-Dec-04
------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2408>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/268>
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<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2407>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/266>
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<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tlkthrd=2405>
<http://emperor.tidbits.com/TidBITS/Talk/265>
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$$
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