Re: OT technicality

Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Tue, 31 Aug 1999 12:55:58 -0400

At 7:36 AM +0100 on 8/31/1999, you wrote:

>     A question for the boffins.  (Brit word.  Ask your WW2
>     grandfathers.)

I never had a Brit grandfather (mine was Irish and, uh, not a West
Briton, and died before I got to meet him), but in a rather circular
way I suppose I am a boffin of computer security rather than the hard
sciences....

>     I communicate via Outlook Express in Windows 98.

This is not a sarcastic statement.  I do not use Windows unless I'm
forced to and never use Outlook Express for anything.  It sounds as
if it saves its mail messages as discrete files.  If so, there's one
way.  However, it might be possible to do it from within OE.

Read the memorable message.  On the pulldown menu, choose File and
see if there's a choice that says "Save As"; if so, select it.  It
will supply you with a dialog box allowing (if it does this and if it
behaves like any sane program that opens discrete files) you to (a)
save to a disk file under some name you supply, and (b) change the
disk and folder in which you put it.  So, you'd navigate using that
dialog box up from the bowels of OE (or wherever it stores its mail)
and go all the way to "My Computer" and pick that and pick the A:
drive (which is the floppy) and then, giving it the name you want,
click the save button.  Poof.  (Not poofter.)  The file will be
stored on disk.

The alternative is that you can make an MS-DOS prompt, and navigate
to the directory that stores your mail, and type the command:

	copy SOMEGOOD.MAI a:SOMEGOOD.MAI

... where "SOMEGOOD.MAI" is the file name.

Ugh.  Not elegant.

The alternative is to open the "my computer" window upon startup and
open the folder that holds your mail and have it minimized; when you
want to do the copy, just go to the minimized button at the bottom of
the screen, and you will have already traversed the tree down to
where the mail is stored, so you'll see the mail there without having
to do the delving.  Then drag the file to A: (or, as you said, 3.5"
slot).

The most elegant way is always to do it from inside the program, and
most well-written programs allow you to save your window to a
separate disk file.

But Microsoft doesn't always do things elegantly.  (The US publisher
O'Reilly & Associates has a series of books about Windows 95/98; one
is "Windows 98 Annoyances"; another is "Outlook Annoyances."  These
programs and operating systems are a pain in the ass sometimes, and
these books are like the Dead Sea Scrolls of the computer world, with
little tidbits that fill in the blanks, or with sad facts that
confirm that the problem you've been trying to solve for the last
hour is a "feature" in the program or OS.)

>     This method seems to work only in an extremely erratic &
>     dodgy way.  Can it be done any more reliably & more elegantly?

Try from within Outlook and send me mail privately, letting me know
the results.  I'll be glad to devise an alternative that I can send
privately.  (I'm still at home with a broken ankle, pale as Boo
Radley, and only have Macs and Unix systems around me, but not a
functional Windows, though I can piece one together quickly as a
test.)

By the way, for anyone who has read this far and is still awake:
check Microsoft's web pages regularly for system updates and patches.
Outlook and some other programs have had serious security problems in
the past, and the patches are expected to protect you from
catastrophe.

--tim