Email source text

TidBITS Talk
22

If opening mail source locally scares you that much, and your email can be viewed via web interface, like iCloud or Gmail or whatever provider you have, IMHO, this is the least risky approach.

23

It used to be that dragging a Mail window proxy icon to a folder or desktop would create an alias to that email message. (10 Internet points to whoever can say what was the last OS X release where that worked.)

This was useful. You could include aliases to related email messages within a folder of other documents.

It is still possible to create these aliases but it takes an AppleScript to do it.

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24

Thanks, but no such option on any iOSes

25

Right, the original question was for MacOS. For iOS there might be something in the app store, or you might need to view the mail in a browser instead of Mail app.

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26

Thanks - sorry for the iOS diversion

27

Thanks, lookingā€¦

28

Humor, Tragedy, and Cautionary Notes - Lost 150,000 Un-Reads (long and embarrassing story) - Great pointer to the Locations of emails, thanks. I used EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard on the disk - man, this thing is good! Got back 169,000+ files. It has nice tools to search even files that it could not put back into the exact place where they were in the file system (all in nicely ordered, named, ā€œmiscā€ foldersā€¦)

To Brian Wā€™s last line:

Users/Library/Mail/V10/E45-33JIL3-FF353KLS-83/Data/8/3/5/Messagesā€¦)

There are HUNDREDS to THOUSANDS of files/folders/sub-folders in that ā€œUsers/Library/Mail/V10ā€ folder. He was not kidding about the depth. Iā€™ve got one that is like 25 deep!

Itā€™s not surprising to me since Iā€™ve done forensics and data recovery exercises for myself, clients, and others for over 5 decades. Certain classes of people go to amazingly contorted lengths to try to hide incriminating stuff.

Details forthcoming in a post to an appropriate Talk topic.

Meantime: ā€œFINā€ - for now :)

29

You see this kind of thing in other places. The reason behind it, I believe, is to improve file access time.

Letā€™s say you have 100,000 files in one directory. You ask the operating system to give you file named LDPOUEWCS3.DAT. How does it find it?

Best case is if the file system indexes the file names in a directory, so it can be located directly. Worst case is if it doesnā€™t, so it has to sequentially search the directory to find the file.

That could hurt. If we assume that weā€™re searching for files randomly (or an even distribution across all 100,000 file names), then on average it would need to find and check 50,000 files before it finds the one it wants. But maybe it isnā€™t evenly distributed. Maybe the files near the end of the directory are the ones that are searched for most often.

So what if, instead, we created a directory tree, based on the file name. So our file LDPOUEWCS3.DAT could be in ā€¦/LD/PO/UE/WC/S3/LDPOUEWCS.DAT. Now the process to find the file becomes a kind of indexed search, because each level of the directory has a much smaller number of entries in it.

What Iā€™ve wondered is if thereā€™s some kind of API built in to macOS for storing files in this fashion.

30

Thanks. Looking for such, pls standby

31

In iCloud Mail using iOS Safari, select a message and then click on the circle with 3 dots inside, and there is an option to See All Headers. No way to see the entire source as far as I know.