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heinz57g
July 26th, 2005, 07:11 AM
i never had problems with aging my mail files every half year, always about 4000 of them by then, with resulting .OLD files of approx 15.000KB.

this time i cant seem to do it. can i have a corrupt file somewhere?

when i set aging to start 26 days back (end of june is shld be), it sets the A flag already on some but not all mssgs from two days ago!

how do i get rid of the A flags to try new settings? they just seem to stick, whatever aging parameters i put, and whatever trials i run.

i do not want to WRITE the file back yet, fearing i might loose my system.

any ideas?

greetings - heinz -

Jeff
July 26th, 2005, 01:08 PM
i never had problems with aging my mail files every half year, always about 4000 of them by then, with resulting .OLD files of approx 15.000KB.

this time i cant seem to do it. can i have a corrupt file somewhere?

when i set aging to start 26 days back (end of june is shld be), it sets the A flag already on some but not all mssgs from two days ago!

how do i get rid of the A flags to try new settings? they just seem to stick, whatever aging parameters i put, and whatever trials i run.

i do not want to WRITE the file back yet, fearing i might loose my system.

any ideas?

greetings - heinz -

How big is your MAIL.MSG file, Heinz? Both in KB and number of msgs. Aging has limits, and I think you may be at or over those limits, but I don't remember what they are.

Meanwhile, the transfer issue... To transfer $6,000 ABN charged me E4.50, to receive and forward that within the US the Federal Reserve charged me $10, and my Wells Fargo Bank charged me $7.50 to receive it. The same charges would apply to any amount less than E or $ 10,000. IOW it would cost about $25 to transfer $25, but most of the charges are within the US.

- Jeff

Lindsey
July 26th, 2005, 03:34 PM
How big is your MAIL.MSG file, Heinz? Both in KB and number of msgs. Aging has limits, and I think you may be at or over those limits, but I don't remember what they are.
Yes, I think you're on the right track. I don't know that there's a precise number, but I do know that there are points at which the sort process seems to end prematurely--on forum message files, I would get message threads that weren't in the proper order. And at about that same point, the date selection on the View wouldn't always work reliably, either. I have a feeling that date problem wtih View is related to the problem that Heinz is seeing with the Aging.

I don't think that was always a problem, but it was one that showed up in one of the later versions (maybe after introducing Y2K changes?), and I don't think Loren was much inclined to try to dig into that part of Martin's code. I think I remember her saying that the date routines were nightmarish, because TAPCIS would accept so many different types of formats in those date fields.

--Lindsey

Jeff
July 27th, 2005, 12:35 PM
I don't think that was always a problem, but it was one that showed up in one of the later versions (maybe after introducing Y2K changes?), and I don't think Loren was much inclined to try to dig into that part of Martin's code. I think I remember her saying that the date routines were nightmarish, because TAPCIS would accept so many different types of formats in those date fields.

--Lindsey

Ummm, do I remember the need to use all four digits for the year?

- Jeff

Judy G. Russell
July 27th, 2005, 04:51 PM
Ummm, do I remember the need to use all four digits for the year?
Not all four digits, as I recall, but 101 for 2001 and 102 for 2002, no?

Lindsey
July 27th, 2005, 06:37 PM
Ummm, do I remember the need to use all four digits for the year?

What Judy said. But I ran into cases where using an explicit date wouldn't work, but using number of days did. And other cases where neither would work.

--Lindsey

heinz57g
July 28th, 2005, 02:41 AM
here the present figures: 6882 mssgs, and MAIL.MSG is 168,517,762.

i thought of this being to big, but then checked the MAILxx.OLD files of the past years, and they are bigger, upto 210.000K. so it worked then ...

any suggestion why the A flag does not reset? same size problem?

simplest i could do is load MAIL.MSG into wordpad or similar, split it in two, and take it (renamed) from there. all i loose are all the flags for READ and REPLIED and whatever on the present file, but they get lost when aging into OLD anyhow (at least i never found a system how to preserve them).

greetings - heinz -

jeff, re transfers: +/- the same i had found out, and certainly proves my point not to transfer USD 5 across the ocean and make the banks even richer.

Judy G. Russell
July 28th, 2005, 08:35 AM
MAIL.MSG is 168,517,762
Yikes! That's a very big file -- the number of messages isn't bad (I think Tapcis' limit is around 16,800 messages) -- but the sheer size of the file is!

heinz57g
July 28th, 2005, 09:21 AM
its MAIL, judy, not forum mssgs. average is 180.000k for every quarter year, over the past 20 years. much less then, but the last 6 years, always over 150.000k and 4000-7000 mssgs. i tend to keep busy.

trust me, i was more than upset when TAPCIS gave up (i know thats not a fair interpretation of the real situation).

greetings - heinz -

Lindsey
July 28th, 2005, 04:49 PM
here the present figures: 6882 mssgs, and MAIL.MSG is 168,517,762.
I'm amazed that file will even load. If I remember correctly, most people found that a file larger than about 30 MB could not be loaded, regardless of the number of messages it represented.

I wouldn't use WordPad to edit the file. Better to use a true text editor that can handle large files--something like TextPad or UltraEdit. If you haven't got something like that, there was a utility in the old TAPCIS library that could be used to split files, and you could set it up to split them on a message boundary. I don't know if I still have a copy of that or not, but let me look.

--Lindsey

heinz57g
July 28th, 2005, 07:10 PM
hold it, hold it, hold it, after your comments and doubts, and getting back to the actual TAPCIS computer (i was out for two days), it turns out i got a comma wrong: it is 16,851,762, i.e. 16MB, and not 160MB.

actually, if you check, i had it right in the very first mssg of this posting, somehow got overwhelmed by all this figures and mutiplied by 10. well, now, if i'd work at a bank everyone would understand ...

the basic problem, even at 1/10th, is still there.

just for experimenting (i do have textpad and ultraedit) i used wordpad to split at a mssg boundary, and tried those files: it works fine, no problem i can see (but the lost flags).

normal aging, from within TAPCIS, would nevertheless be > m u c h < nicer.

greetings, and sorry for the confusion - heinz -

Lindsey
July 28th, 2005, 09:18 PM
Aha! Yes, 16 MB makes much more sense!!

The reason I warned you against WordPad is that it is not a plain text editor, and if you're not careful, you can get non-text files, which TAPCIS wouldn't be able to read. But since you like to live dangerously ;) I'm glad you are at least careful.

I wish I could offer you a solution to the problem, but I'm afraid I don't have one. I didn't use the aging feature, but since I always tended to keep large message files, the "sort fails over a certain size" problem is one that I struggled against constantly towards the end.

--Lindsey

MollyM/CA
July 28th, 2005, 11:34 PM
Heinz, one easy way out when files get too big for TapCis or too big for easy management is to just rename the current MAIL.OLD file and start anew. For instance, you could name it MAIL_2_7.OLD (the month numbers) and still be able to use the Tap amenities to search and whatnot.

When you need to dig into an .OLD file you can prolong its life by taking a few minutes each time to delete unneeded messages --you don't really need to save the system messages, for instance.

The TapCis indexing system is so bulletproof that I've never had any trouble. The rename will leave you with no index file for the newly named file and one that doesn't match for the new MAIL.OLD file --but TapCis has sniffed out the mismatch and created a new index every time, for me.

heinz57g
July 29th, 2005, 03:09 AM
lindsey, re wordpad, i have so many backups of all files, i could sell them. i am overcareful with these things. an inventory of close to 200000 faxes/mails/mssgs (i checked the zeros this time) is important and invaluable to me. but it does go a while back ... 1983, well before TAPCIS too.

so if any system does not work, i'll use a backup to try another.

molly, thats basically what i had said further up, in not so many words. i use the AGING to create an old file, as accurately as possible every three months, then rename that MSG.OLD to MSG501.OLD for example, then have them in a special subdirectory to which TAPCIS points and reads them. works like a charm. 'unneeded' mssgs have long been weeded out at that point.

only this time i am months late for the last AGING, and thats where the problems came up.

guess i have to do the manual split and rename routine.

greetings - heinz -

Judy G. Russell
July 29th, 2005, 10:34 AM
hold it, hold it, hold it, after your comments and doubts, and getting back to the actual TAPCIS computer (i was out for two days), it turns out i got a comma wrong: it is 16,851,762, i.e. 16MB, and not 160MB.
ROFL!! Yeah, that's just a little different!

I notice that you say this is happening no matter what size file you use. Is it possible that the aging attributes for the file are set wrong?

heinz57g
July 29th, 2005, 11:01 AM
judy, not really. they have been set correctly for 10+ years, so i doubt i made a mistake here. filesize that seems to give trouble is anything over 14MB.

is there anywhere a listing about what all the TAPCIS flags mean? cant really find it in the handbook. and they seem to get set funnily when aging, so that might give a clue.

greetings - heinz -

Judy G. Russell
July 29th, 2005, 01:29 PM
filesize that seems to give trouble is anything over 14MB.
That sounds about right. Cutting the file into smaller chunks should solve the problem -- and aging future files on a more regular basis to avoid the large file size.

is there anywhere a listing about what all the TAPCIS flags mean?
Unfortunately, I'm stuck using a new computer that doesn't have Tapcis on it yet so I can't check but I think there's something in the Help files on flags.

Lindsey
July 29th, 2005, 10:46 PM
The TapCis indexing system is so bulletproof that I've never had any trouble. The rename will leave you with no index file for the newly named file and one that doesn't match for the new MAIL.OLD file --but TapCis has sniffed out the mismatch and created a new index every time, for me.
You could, of course, rename the index file at the same time you rename the message file. The index for filename.abc is filename.~bc.

--Lindsey