Archive for the Pooters Category

Dear lazyweb – what should I do with all this email?

I get a lot of email. I currently have 9 different email accounts spread across work and personal stuff, the important email all is IMAP (on my own server) with list mail being spread across gmail accounts and some POP accounts on my server.

Not only do I get a lot of email every day, I have a lot of email going back many years. I have an IMAP folder for each client of edgeofmyseat.com and some of those folders have now got so big the only mail client that seems able to cope with them is KMail on KDE, Mail.app on OS X gave up some time ago. This is a problem as I need to be able to get into that mail, but I don’t want to download it all from IMAP as I like to be able to get at it from numerous locations.

My other problem with archiving my mail is that I have a curious memory for where things are. My email structure is a bit like my bookcase. If I’m writing something and need a quote from a book I will know exactly where on the bookcase the book is, and where in the book the line of text I need is. This works just fine until someone moves a book and I start to wonder if I’m going insane! Email is the same. If a client phones up and asks me about some project that happened 2 years ago, I know where in my folder structure and how many messages into the mailbox that email will be … I can see it. I’m afraid that moving the messages could throw my peculiar mental systems into disarray.

However I need to do something about the situation, as it has got to the point where I can’t open some of these mailboxes. Knowing the location of individual messages within them isn’t helpful if I can’t view the things. Also I would like to be able to give Drew access to the back history of edgeofmyseat.com clients prior to his joining the company last year, and much of that is tied up in my mail.

I can’t be the only person who has found themselves with this problem, so I ask the lazyweb – what should I do with all this email? My requirements are:

• To be able to create an archive of the email in a format that still resembles the email structure so I can find things as I do now
• The archive needs to be stored centrally on a server so I can get to it wherever I happen to be working
• I would like Drew to be able to read and search this archive without needing to download it all
• I don’t want a single platform solution, I work on a Mac at home and Linux in the office

Syncing the Nokia 9500 Communicator with Tiger

I was disappointed to see that my Nokia 9500 wasn’t supported by iSync, however a bit of searching this afternoon turned up this thread on Mac OS X Hints. I just replaced every mention of 9300 with 9500 and it all worked beautifully. It goes without saying that making a copy of the file that you need to edit and backing up your data first is a good idea!

Mac Mini

In sympathy for my advancing years my very lovely boyfriend bought me a Mac Mini for my birthday. It’s so tiny! The Windows desktop it is going to replace is a Shuttle, so not exactly a monster of a thing, but you could stack 5 Mac Minis in the same space.

First impressions are good – it feels fast, applications launch very quickly and Mail.app is as nice as Kmail which I use at work. I have to have a mail client that I am happy with, email issues make me grumpy. Other than that I’m still just poking around at the moment, playing with my new toy. I’ve ordered Office so once that arrives I might actually be able to get down and do some real work.

Moving offices

It has been admittedly a rather long time since I posted here. The main reason for the hiatus was moving my business out of my home office and to new office premises. This all went fairly smoothly although it is very strange to not be working from home after three and a half years of my commute being up the stairs and into the attic!

The office move encouraged a decision that I have been wanting to make for a while – to go entirely to Linux for my business desktop machines. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using Linux on the desktop for years, but never quite made a complete switch, and a lot of that was because my business and personal computing needs were linked. As a writer I need Microsoft Word for compatibility. In my business however, I mainly edit text files all day, and the type of office documents I need to edit are fairly basic and OpenOffice.org copes with them just fine.

I figured I could always switch back if it went horribly wrong so not only did I move offices on February 14th … I switched operating systems. We are now running with a Linux domain controller doing all the network logins using Samba (replacing the absolute nightmare that is Active Directory) and also handling DNS and Linux + KDE on the desktop, and it’s all gone incredibly well.

Back at home my Windows desktop looks horribly old fashioned and clunky after working all day on the loveliness that is KDE, but it needed replacing anyway, so for my writing and my general pootering around at home … I’m going to be getting me a Mac Mini. Thanks for all the advice in my previous thread, the office move has removed some of my issues anyway – I’m dealing with the QuickBooks issue and the need for Windows for browser testing by using my laptop which covers me if I need that at home and at work.