Final Tally
SO I finally plowed through the entire review that Alain gave in his comment. Overall Tiger looks awesome. The one thing I didn’t like I don’t like so much that it almost makes me not actually want to upgrade at all. Apparently in Tiger, the searching happens on a file granular basis. Because of this, in order to search e-mail, they will need to abandon the venerable mbox format. I don’t know how many of you know my mail habits, but in the bad old days I used to switch mailers all the time. The common thread was the mbox format. Somewhere along the road I decided that Eudora would be my backup system from then on, so I started saving all my mail in Eudora. Their file format is very close to mbox, but has some flaws. When apple’s mail came out I thought it used some proprietary format. Well it turns out that they just needed some extra stuff that mbox didn’t include, so rather than expanding it like Eudora did, they just included the extra info in other files and packaged it all together in a os x “Package”. But the underlying format was a true unadulterated mbox. I discovered a mail program that would work even better than Eudora as my archival format. Well it looks like they are abandoning that nice, pure, dare I say perfect? format. *sigh*
Looks like I’ll have to make a trip to the Apple store and play with Tiger’s mail implementation and see how it works on the inside. Dude that would suck, I finally switched over last year and have been loving life ever since. Oh well.
I guess the question is: how hard would it be for you to write a {Perl/Python/Ruby/other} script that would convert your individual files into mbox format? If they do things right, then it wouldn’t be too bad.
-alain
That’s true. I’m not sure how I’ll figure that out before buying it though!