Actually, I should clarify -- I always carry two *buckets*, not two
frightened sailors. Sometimes there are two frightened sailors, to
be sure, but usually it's two happy sailors.
For those who may be interested, I have restructured my email archive
of this list into monthly sections -- the old archive was getting
completely unwieldy with over 3000 messages. See
http://songbird.com/py/newarchive for the new one.
There used to be a web-based archive of the list, and it had a lot
of real good stuff -- I remember, for example a long thread on
people's experience replacing the cockpit drain. That old archive
is long gone, replaced by a bunch of compressed files that are very
hard to use. Those old archives took up a lot of space, I guess.
I don't have unlimited disk space for an archive, either, and
certain parties I won't name have the bad habit of completely quoting
the messages that they reply to. Besides doubling or tripling or
quadrupling the download time for people on slow connections, this
doubles or triples or quadruples the disk space I burn for an
archive. Also, it is a royal pain, when going through an archive,
to see the same message quoted over and over again, as people reply,
and reply to replies, and the > > > > > > strings build up on the
left margin...
So I don't keep a complete record of all email on this list -- I
throw out
spam,
lighthearted but transient banter,
boats for sale,
"me too" posts,
posts consisting mostly of quoted text with little new content,
other stuff that I don't want to spend disk space on
That is, I try to keep stuff that might be interesting reading a year
from now...without burning too much disk space in the process.
-- Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be kent@songbird.com lonesome." -- Mark Twain