Posted on Jul 13th 2008 by matt.
Today we released the Emailchemy Memory Boost app, and I’m hoping it helps people deal with some of the gigantic email archives they’ve been writing to me about.
I originally designed Emailchemy to run in as little memory as possible, simply because at that time most computers had 32MB total of RAM. And, being that I was writing Emailchemy in Java, I had to be extra careful about how much heap space (“working memory”) Emailchemy required. This presented a specific requirement to not load an entire email message into memory for processing, because even back then, an email could be 10MB or larger with big attachments and most computers at the time would have choked under that weight. So, Emailchemy was designed to process the contents of an email in chunks, and it was able to run and convert any email in under 6MB of memory.
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Posted on Jul 6th 2008 by matt.
I am an email packrat. I first started using email at college back in 1990. Back then, all I used for reading email was the UNIX "mail" program. As I became more sophisticated I began to use Elm. For one reason or another, I was saving all my email, and eventually, I wanted greater control over it. So, I started using Eudora to manage my email from my dorm-room Macintosh Centris 610.
When I got out of college, most employers didn’t provide email, but mine did. It was considered somewhat of a perk and using it for personal correspondence was perfectly acceptable. As in college, I was once again saving all my personal email. Integrating it with my college email archives wasn’t a big deal since the company I worked for also used Eudora. But after a while, the big software companies discovered that professional email tools were a big market, and that is when the problems began.
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Posted on Jul 3rd 2008 by matt.
I’m not sure exactly which update did it, but Entourage has lost the ability to double-click import Entourage archives (.rge files). I for one found this feature very convenient, but that’s probably because I’ll import tens of archives in a single day when I’m testing a new converter. Still, it made it easy to describe the migration steps to customers moving to Entourage: “Convert and Double-click!”
No more.
I tested this with RGE files created by Entourage itself as well as RGE files created by Emailchemy, and every time Entourage 2008 would open when double clicking the RGE file, but no import. I now have to import using Entourage’s Import Wizard, which works, but just isn’t as fast or convenient.
