Ladies and Gentlemen, In the process of moving PowerMail to XCode and Intel, we discussed long and hard the matter of maximum database size and have decided, for technical and philosophical reasons, that the right thing to do was to keep the 2GB limit.
First, a foreword: our strong feeling is that adding daily to an active database larger than 1.9GB for the sole purpose of having everything within the current database accessible "just in case" is like carrying around one's entire savings in one's wallet, for the sake of being able to buy anything you might run into (a house, boat or even a lake) "just in case" you run into such an opportunity in the course of day. In both cases, the risk of compromising what you're trying to protect greatly outweighs the benefit, and most people would rather be on the safe side. Furthermore, one of the features implemented long ago (in PowerMail 3) is the ability to switch user environments either by the ad hoc menu option in the File menu - which lets you open any number of offline or otherwise inactive 1.9 GB databases and perform searches in them with the built-in search facility. We even have a quick way of switching user environments, which is to alias offline Message Databases and double- click on them to go from one environment to another in a few seconds. Finally, we addressed the simultaneous aspects (having the ability to work on a large database, while being able simultaneously to search in other large databases) when we wrote FoxTrot Personal Search, which indexes *and previews message content of* any number of current and offline PowerMail database contents. The big advantage of using FoxTrot Personal Search for large archives over PowerMail is that you are accessing your archives in a Read Only fashion, which means you never run the risk of compromising a large amount of data, nor needing to rebuild it or so. So there you go. Yes, this is a political decision, as are many design decisions since we've been writing software; we've really tried to take a vast majority of usages into account before making it, and feel comfortable that we've done what is good for our users. Cheers, jean michel/ctm qa
