How to sort & edit "History.lst" file entries?

[liz]

I'm on Eudora 7.1.0.9 on WinXP.

I would like to clean up my "History.lst" file (autocomplete for e-mail
addresses) because it is full of old entries. Also any miskeyed addresses I
made in the past are included.

I want to sort the entries in order of email address. Then I can edit
duplicates and get rid of old entries and so on.

I opened the file with Excel 2003 but it got messy. I wanted two columns in
Excel ... one containing the adressee name (if any) and one containing the
address. Unfortunately when I instructed Excel to use a delimiter of "<" I
found the delimiter itself was stripped away from the entry shown in Excel.

Is there an easier utility which I can use to manipulate History.lst !

--
Liz

[liz]

On 03:54 7 Nov 2012, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:27:33 GMT, liz <n...@home.com> declaimed the
> following in comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows:

> Open in a /text/ editor (not word processor)...
>
> find <
> replace \t<
>
> (where \t is an escape code for a tab character -- you may have to
> check the documentation regarding what the editor uses and how to make
> it treat escapes as desired)
>
> Then import in Excel as a tab-separated-file.
>
> Note that the \t will only work for lines with a
> real name <email@address>
> or only
> <email@address>
>
> Lines with no real name, and no <...> are going to put the
> email@address in the first column

Thank you Dennis. That sounds like a good approach. I will try it.

Much appreciated!

--
Liz

[John H Meyers]

On 11/6/2012 11:27 AM, liz wrote:

> I'm on Eudora 7.1.0.9 on WinXP.
>
> I would like to clean up my "History.lst" file

> (autocomplete for e-mail)
> [to] edit duplicates and get rid of old entries.

>
> I opened the file with Excel 2003 but it got messy.

> Is there an easier utility which I can use to manipulate History.lst

Yes, since Eudora has this ability built-in,
as well as automatically accommodating
the much greater range of formats
of the lines which I find in my own "history list" file,
which would obviate the use of any "spreadsheet" program,
as well as the notion that the list can be divided
into "two columns" in any way that applies to all possible entries.

In your "Auto-completion" options,
select only "History file" for the time being.

Also select "Use drop down list"
and "Names should appear in alphabetical order"
(you can change this back after doing your editing).

Set "Maximum entries to keep in history"
to whatever value you want -- excess entries
are automatically trimmed off the "oldest unused" end of the list,
leaving nothing in that direction for you to need to do yourself
(whereas if you sort that list yourself, you will thereby
have destroyed that natural built-in ordering).

Now start to compose a new message, and
type some letter or character (e.g. "a" or "<") into the "To:" field.

Voila -- an alphabetized list of names (or addresses) appears,
all of which start with that letter or character,
and each item even includes an icon to identify its source
(e.g. History list vs. Address books).

You can move through your list via the up/down (cursor) keys,
and you can delete unwanted entries using the DEL[ete] key.

Use "backspace" to change the "To" field without altering
any source of auto-completion entries.

Personally, I see no need to do this, since when I normally
compose real messages, and let auto-completion work normally
(presenting the "most recent" items first), the opportunity
to delete duplicate entries is always present anyway, and if I don't
see any duplicates, then I'm not being bothered by duplicates,
so why bother trying to hunt down the last possible one,
unless and until it ever comes up naturally?

Useless (or even counterproductive) "busy work"
is always being invented, however,
as anyone who ever held something called a "job"
may have encountered :)

P.S. a secret document known as a "Eudora manual"
comes in the form of a searchable and hyper-linked PDF file,
and covers all of this, amply illustrated, on pages 39-41:
<http://www.eudora.com/download/eudora/windows/7.1/Eudora_71_User_Manual.pdf>

---

Why can presidents go on serving even after having had an affair,
and even after lying to everyone about it,
while a most outstanding military leader (and recently US CIA chief)
has to resign, after forthrightly facing and telling only the truth?

Like the above inconsequential Eudora mismanagement,
so does the entire world march itself off various cliffs,
using the wrong parts of its "brain" (or collective consciousness)
than are best suited to various purposes.

--