Art Kleiner said:
Can you tell me more about MySQL? Will that accept Entourage data bases
automatically?
No. I don't know of any database program that does anything
"automatically". No doubt someone has written a script that imports
emails into FileMaker Pro. And a quick google search reveals that
various people have written scripts for parsing mboxes into MySQL. The
reason I mentioned MySQL is that it's free, it's fast, and I trust it
with my data a lot more readily than I would FileMaker.
I'm looking for an easy solution to exactly this problem - a way to
store my old archives easily, copy them out without fuss, and search
them for old messages by email name, subject, or keyword. In other
words, I don't want to spend a lot of time filing old emails - but I
want to retrieve any of them instantly when I want them.
Can MySQL be the solution for this? Please say more.
It can be, but it would be up to you to parse the data to get the data
in there.
However, as I've said here many times before, pure text is just fine.
Simply dragging a mailbox to the desktop gives you text, and you can
search multiple text files quickly in smart ways using BBEdit or its
free little brother, TextWrangler. That in fact is what I generally do.
Plain text, in other words, can be a database, provided the ways in
which you can retrieve and mine the data are satisfactory. And it is as
safe as data can ever be. Snobs, including some smart people who should
know better, turn up their noses at this, but everything depends on your
scale and needs (and how much time you want to spend working out a
solution, etc., etc.).
Basically, the use of a database for the storage of email within the
email program itself is overengineering. Eudora's files are just text,
yet its search is way faster than Entourage's. Mailsmith's speed is even
worse (use of an internal database was an astonishingly odd decision on
the part of BareBones, who make BBEdit and should have known better).
And when you've got a database program running inside a mail program, as
with Entourage, there is always the chance that the database code will
misbehave and you'll lose your data (as we hear happening all too often
with Entourage). So, use a mail client for mail and a database program
for storing / sorting / searching data and you'll be much happier,
faster, and safer. m.
