Subject: TIP: Rescuing deleted addressbook entries

From: Geordi Byron <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 14:35:29 -0400

I really screwed up the other day and deleated a 50-odd address list from
my address book. Fortunately I had mail from each of the folk on the list
so I was able to reconstruct it into a file which I had planned to edit to
fit the .addressbook format and concatenate the two. WHen I went into the
addressbook to see what the formate was, though I found that all the
addresses I'd ever endered were there but with a "DELETED,"ect before. By
removing that peice of the line, I was able to "undelete" the list.

Assuming not only twits like myself make this mistake, I offer it to y'all
so you can do it yourself when you do. Perhaps the powers-that-be could
add this to the help files.

		Be well and happy
			
			Geordi Byron (aka Arete)

		http://www.smart.net/~arete/classics

             [Please cc on-group replies personally to me]

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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 09:58:28 +0100 (BST)

I recently discovered the same feature...

Interestingly my reaction was the opposite: I was disgruntled to learn
that all the entries I'd have had and deleted were still there, taking up
disk space.

I don't know of any indication of this behaviour in the on-line help or,
more usefully, how to "Expunge" the Address Book and get rid of these
"deleted" entries.

Does any one know if it is possible to do this _within Pine_?  If not,
perhaps it should be added?

Cheers,

-- 
Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computing Service, University of York, Heslington, York, YO1 5DD, UK
Tel: +44-1904-433811  FAX: +44-1904-433740  http://www.york.ac.uk/~pmb1/

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From: Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 1997 09:07:01 -0700 (PDT)

It isn't possible to do anything with those lines from within pine. We
added it to aid our help desk people when somebody called who had deleted
an important distribution list. Whenever you make a change to your address
book all of the DELETED entries older than 100 days are really deleted. To
reduce the time from 100 days you could change ABOOK_DELETED_EXPIRE_TIME
in adrbklib.h to some smaller number, like 0, and recompile. To get rid of
them by hand you just edit out those lines.

-- 
Steve Hubert <[email-masked]>
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle