I thought I would offer some constructive criticism for the Bat! in an effort to bring to the forefront some of the issues that I have with it, considering that I just migrated to it after nearly 10 years of dedication to Pegasus Mail.  The Bat really is the most powerful email client available and I'd like to do what I can to further make it the best and most complete email client available.  There may already be solutions to some of the problems I mention, and if you know it, please don't hesitate to share it here.  Being a rookie, I'll admit that i haven't figured everything out.

(1) My first issue is the navigation through the message lists or folders.  My problem mainly arises when you double-click a message to view it in a separate window.  There are two buttons (Follow Next/Previous) and what they do is use the date of the email to go to the next/previous email in the folder.  I find this confusing because "Next" really means the next oldest, and "Previous" means the previous newest email.  In other words, the Next button will send you back in time chronologically, and the Previous button will send you forward in time Chronologically.  I like to read my email in chronological order, so I want next to mean the opposite of what it's doing.  This wouldn't be a problem if those two buttons followed the order that the mailbox is sorted in the window, because then the user can control what the buttons mean simply by changing it's sorting method.  But that feature is not available.  The only way this can be done is if you use the "up/down" key while scrolling through a mailbox with the message preview pane on.  But it would be nice to navigate the same way USING BUTTONS when messages are opened in their own window.

(2) Hotkeys:  programs this powerful generally have a sizeable amount of keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys).  The Bat is no different.  However, most of the hotkeys are preassigned and cannot be changed (except for a handful of "System" hotkeys).  I'm of the opinion, that they should allow the user to make the hotkeys fit their needs.  No big deal, but why not?

(3) Selective quoting in replies.  This is a feature I got used to in Pegasus.  When you reply to a message, typically the entire message gets quoted using the ">" symbol.  In Pegasus, if you highlighted a portion of the original message and then hit reply, you have the option to only have the highlighted portion quoted.  I know that you can just delete the parts you don't want, but it was a real handy feature.

(4) The Help file:  initially, I was extremely disappointed by the help file that comes with the Bat.  However, I later realized that it's better than I gave it credit for.  But it still is not as good as it should be.  I strongly believe that any checkbox and any word that is found anywhere in the preferences or options, should have the exact same word somewhere in the help file with a description of it.  Why add toggles and features and not explain it in documentation?  I think I couldn't find the descriptions of several optionsin the help file or anywhere else.  Also, next to the OK and Cancel buttons in the preferences dialog, there is also a Help button, but all it does is take you to a screenshot of that particular part of the dialog without any explanation of the options there.  The best way to do this, personally, is to have that little question mark button in the upper right hand corner, where you can click it, then click on a option, and have a little ballon explain what that option does.
Also, going back to keyboard shortcuts, the Bat has a lot of them, but there's no section in the help file that lists them all.  They list a few of them, but not all, like they should.  Fortunately, someone else in their forums has compiled a supposedly complete list of them, but it should be an official part of the help file.


Anyway, that's it for now.  I don't mean anything derogatory by all this, I'm doing this in hopes of helping others and helping the developers improve their program.  It's obvious that they care about power and customizability since they have put so many features into their program, so adding some more should be right in line with their philosophy.  Any advice/suggestions is appreciated, and as I become more experienced with the program, I will add more to this thread.

I'm interested in how some of you powerusers organize your email.  Maybe you can help me come up with a better way, or maybe my way is good enough.  I thought it would be an interesting discussion.

I'm the kind of person that hasn't deleted an email since I started using email about 10 years ago.  I keep it all like a packrat because I consider it part of my personal history.  However, as you can imagine, it gets a bit much.  Here is my organizing philosophy, most of which is accomplished with automatic filtering, some of which is organized manually once or year:

--All of my personal correspondences (friends, family) go into a big "personal" folder.  I don't subfilter at all, it's just one big block of email sorted by date.  If I could thread it like newsgroups, I would, but it's impossible to thread email as well as newsgroups...I've seen no program that can do it (i think it's a limitation in the email protocol itself).

--Email that is not very personal that I consistently get on a large volume gets it's own folder.  Examples of this are emails from discussion groups, or emails related to ebay/paypal, etc.

--I filter out annoying email or other stuff that is not necessarily spam, but still pretty annoying.  This includes things like forwards, and group emails that are not addressed to me personally.  They go into a "forwards" or "misc" folder depending on my algorithm.

--I also keep a two sets of archive folders.  These apply only for my personal folder and outbox folder.  Once a year, I make a new archive folder for that year, one for personal and one for outbox.  I transfer all of that year's messages into the box.  This way, it keeps my personal and outbox mailbox a manageable size and I can always go back and check out older messages I have sent/recieved.


So that is how I do it, I'd be interested in how some of you do it.  I know I have some friends who sort out their emails in separate folders for each contact.  That's a little bit too much for me because then I lose the overall chronological feel to the messages.  Also, most of friends don't save all of their email, just a few that they really want.

I've wondered about this "poweruser" question for a while now, and I know this is the perfect place to get an answer.  I'm wondering how you guys backup your information stored on your computer.  I'm not talking about making an image of your system or anything like, I'm talking about backing up stand alone files, like mp3's, your documents, receipts, pictures, etc.

Up until now, what I always do is have two directories, "new" and "burned".  As you can tell, stuff that gets burned then gets moved from "new" to "burned" so I know that it's been taken care of.  I do this for each category, so for my pictures directory, I have a new and burned directory, and same for "my documents", etc.

But I was looking at software like Genie Backup, and I see that it can "span" or something, where it sounds like I can make incremental backups as necessary.  Like, as my directory grows by about 4 GB, I know it's time to burn another DVD...so can I just use Genie, and it will automatically detect which files are new/changed, and only burn those on the new DVD?  Is that how it works?

The other problem with that is that I won't be able to tell what is backed up and what isn't just by browsing my files.  If I use the incremental backup way, I feel like I have to ditch my previous "new/backup" method, because otherwise, the program would burn everything because technically they are changing locations.

Anyway, so I was wondering how you guys go about backing up your files.  I just have this feeling that I am going about rather inefficiently.