Powerful search tools for Synth-DIY archives

[Conrad Scott]

Continuing this gentle side-line to synth building and tweaking:

Ingo wrote about search tools for the Synth-DIY mail archives +
converting them to formats for other tools. Just FYI, I use two
mechanisms to access the archives that I've downloaded.

i) Read the whole archive into Emacs (see www.xemacs.org for downloads
for various platforms including Windows 95 and NT). Other editors may be
happy to swallow the entire archive in one piece, I'm not sure how
happily though. You could also try the (Unix) `grep' program from, e.g.,
the GNU project (try the pre-compiled Cygnus distribution). Warning:
both of these (especially XEmacs) are *huge* downloads...

ii) Munge the archive into the standard (i.e. Unix) e-mail archive
format and put it in the Netscape mail directory. Netscape then provides
search tools and will handle (most) of the attachments. Other e-mail
programs may well use the same format, YMMV.

The e-mail archive format is for each e-mail to begin with a line
starting 'From ' (that's a space after `From') and continue to the end
of the file or the next such start line. Following the `From ' is the
name of the sender. Any other `From's at the start of a line are quoted
with a `>' character. (I edited the original archives in XEmacs with a
few search and replaces.)

That's all folks.

// Conrad