Text Archives

If you select b/u (or Backup) as an option for one or more message sections, mehitabel will append all deleted messages in these sections to text files called SectionName.txt, where SectionName is the actual name of the message section from which the messages were archived. These text files will be located in the folder you designate (b/u text path) in the Configure dialog.

You can control the maximum size of these text archives by setting max b/u text size in kilobytes in the Configure dialog. The number you enter is multiplied by 1024 to produce a kilobyte result. If max b/u text size is set at a number less than one, mehitabel does not regulate the file size.

To control file size, mehitabel subtracts the limit you set from the actual file size and begins reading the text, looking for the beginning of the next message. Once the beginning is found, mehitabel rewrites the file with the first message at the beginning. The result is a text file which will almost always be a bit smaller than the limit you set, but which has a clean beginning and ending.

mehitabel uses two nulls — ASCII zeroes — and an extra carriage return to mark the end of each message. These nulls are invisible to almost all programs.

If you want to put additional separation characters (hyphens, asterisks, slashes or whatever) between messages, you can use ResEdit to modify STR  514. These characters will be appended to the line after the two nulls. As shipped, STR  514 is empty.

Archiving to text is a useful technique to preserve messages without clogging your main message sections. You can set up Archie to do text file searches on these menus if you or your callers want to check for messages which have scrolled off of the main sections.