STMug Meeting for September 2003

First and foremost, if your not using Mozilla or Thunderbird for mail, you should at least take a look! Here is an article that goes into detail on everything you need to know. Part 5 digs into the junk mail controls, which is what makes it worth switching.

>It was mentioned that if you ordered a 2 ghz G5 it might not come for a while because Virginia Tech has plans to build a G5 cluster of 1100 units.

Side Note: The other companies that bid on the project were: Dell, HP, and IBM. The other bids were twice the price with twice as many processors as Apple's!

I like the fact that it is 19.25 tons of G5 machinery.

Links to stories: Link 1 Link 2 Link 3

>The new Toast was demonstrated, has some nice features for making DVD's and CD's.

>ICan a piece of shareware: download

Ican will place a trash can on your desktop just like in the old days! The real goodie is it will let you "force" a delete and kill anything in your trash can!

>Tom Hand E-mailed me with a description of compacting mailboxes:

At last night’s meeting, we got into the subject of email problems with Netscape. We were discussing items which might create problems with the behavior of the email client which is part of Netscape and while trashing the preferences is the first thing to do (as always), I suggested also to compact the folders to shrink the database file kept by the program.
For the most part, I had vacant stares coming at me from the seated masses.
The main email programs in use on the Mac store their data in a single file for use of the program to display current, sent, deleted and saved messages. While not exactly the same between all the programs, the idea is essentially the same. They maintain the database file for storage of the messages within the display GUI of the email program.
As time goes on and you receive and send emails, this database increases in size as your DATA use goes on. In other words, as you receive, send, store, delete emails, all this activity is recorded and stored by the database file of the program. Note that when you delete an email from the folders within your email program, they never do appear in your desktop/finder’s trash bin. But they do disappear from the folder you ‘trashed’ them from. Where do they go? Into the ‘deleted items’ folder for deletion either when you close your program or when you manually delete them-that depends on the settings in your preferences.
Now, you think you’ve totally deleted the emails and related attachments, don’t you? Nope. They’re still there taking up space in the database and hard drive. All that has been changed is a flag in the message which tells the program to no longer display the messages in the program. All that data is still in the database. Is it secure? I’ve read some items suggesting that the files ARE hackable but I cannot find said references currently. However, the other problem with this database file getting larger and larger is that the email program has to load the file each time you launch the program and that information takes up time, RAM and processing speed.
So, what to do about it? Compact the folders (Mozilla-derivatives) or rebuild your mailbox (Apple Mail.app) or rebuild the database (Entourage).
In Entourage, it’s easy: hold down the option key as you launch the program and it will ask you if you want to rebuild the database files. Click yes and it’s automatic. You’ll want to make sure you’ve cleaned up your folders as much as you wanted to first (delete files in other words) so you’ll maximize the compacting. After Entourage is done, it will launch normally and you’ll be able to go into your user file in the documents folder and delete the old renamed files.
In Navigator/Mozilla/Thunderbird you simply go to the edit menu and down to ‘compact folders’ and let it do its thing. Nothing more to throw away.
In Mail it’s in the Mailbox menu and down to ‘rebuild mailbox’....should do the trick. I believe it only works on the POP accounts. IMAP messages are all left on the server.
After you’re done performing this cleanup, the program will be more responsive (if it’d been a long time or never since you’d ever done this) and likely more stable.
Hope you find this helpful.

Tom Hand
Beleaguered President, STMUG