[Diy_efi] I must be asking lame questions.

[Brian Dessent]

Grant Beaty wrote:

> I asked about more recent achives to search, and no one answered me, so
> don't feel bad (one big searchable file would be easier...) I guess I'll
> just have to keep asking really annoying newbie questions that have already
> been answered 50 times ;)

There a lot of messages.  They go back to May of 94 I believe.  What we
really need is for them to be properly indexed.  Someone with some
server space should take the archives, run them through MHonArc and
Glimpse (or apparently a program called Wilma automates this) and then
we would have nicely threaded html archives complete with a search
capability.  Until then, here's what *I* do to search the messages.  I'm
sure others have their own methods, but this works well for me:

1. Get the messages in one large mail file.  Since it seems the archive
link on the web page is broken, I took the liberty of uploading the
*complete* archive (every single message from the start until today) to
the incoming directory.  The filename is diy_efi-complete-archive.zip. 
Here's a link to it:

ftp://ftp.diy-efi.org/incoming/diy_efi-complete-archive.zip

Note that this file is about 31MB, and inside is a text file that is
about 136MB.  You can view this with any text file viewer/editor, but
beware: you want one that can read unix-style files (newlines only, not
cr/lf), and you want one that doesn't load the whole file into memory. 
See below for a better way.

2. Get and install Netscape Messenger (from Communicator 4.x) a.k.a. the
netscape mail client.  If you have the browser, you probably already
have this.  Note that the post 4.x (Mozilla based) releases might work,
but 4.x works much better than any of the 6.x versions.

3. Put the large file in your Netscape mail directory.  Usually this is 
"c:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\(yourname)\Mail" where (yourname) is
the Netscape profile name.

4. Open the Netscape mail client, and it should show a new folder under
Local Mail with the name of the file you put in the directory ("diy_efi
complete" unless you changed it.)  Click on this folder, and wait while
it generates its summary (index) file.  After it has created the index,
access will be much faster.

5. You can browse the messages, or search.  To browse, just click on
whatever column header you want to sort on.  I prefer "by Order
Received" (View -> Sort -> Order received.)  This will order the
messages in approximately chronological order.  If you sort by date you
will get a little confused as some messages have incorrect dates.

6. TO SEARCH.  Here's the useful bit.  Choose Edit -> Search Messages. 
Now you can enter multiple search criteria.  I find this much easier
than searching in a text editor, since you can select multiple keywords
that you're interested in.  For example, to search for messages that
contain "Bosch" and "MAF": select "body contains bosch", hit the More
button, select "body contains maf".  Now select "Match All of the
following" and hit search.  Messages that match the criteria
are listed below, and you can double click to read each one.  This is a
fairly powerful search widget, much more useful than looking for single
words in a text file.

Brian

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