Using askSam Database; Email Database, aka(InfoBase)

Contributed by Richard Nagle

CMS, President/CEO

Reprinted with Permission

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The Information Highway; Information is everywhere, here, there all around us...

What to do with it all? Case in point; email is today's modern way of communicating between people and businesses around the globe. Emails can be sent in batch of 100+ or 1000+ in minutes, try making that many phone calls in a day. Today's email clients software weren't built for handling massive amounts of email on a daily basis. In our case, they were just falling apart. Data corruption was the problem.

So, I purge and purge, but really, I am throwing away perhaps, "Potential Business Opportunities".  So I save massive amounts of email with askSam.

But, before I get into that, look at what we've done before. Our company CMS, is based in Florida, we are Computer Resellers, Consultants, Beta Testers, & Database Programmers.

The database software that we have used in the past are, PC: (dBase, Paradox.) Mac: (4D, Provue, Double Helix, Filemaker.)

When all was said and done, it was the same problem, the note field or memo field... those databases, can't handle larger amounts of text, and to search it as well, forget about doing reports on a memo field too. We found and chose askSam. I found I could do more with free form text than any other database.

Now Onward...

First, I had to get the emails exported out of Outlook Express for Macintosh, then into askSam. This was a problem, the import filters of askSam work on PC email clients only. There seems to be a slight difference on how Outlook Express on the Mac made it's file. We did a search on the Net, and found a program that would export Outlook Express email into a Text format. [Smile]

Second, I did a test on a few records, and found that there was an "Email ID" Header that I could use, as the text delimiter, while importing.

Third, so then I created an "Email Database". Just think, I can save up to 16TB with the new increases in an askSam file size.

Fourth, we open the "Email Database" and imported, all our emails into askSam, via the "text" delimiter. [Grin]

Fifth, now the fun part, do a search and see how fast it is.  Compare this to your old email client, it's Night and Day. Our database has 92,869 Emails.

Now I can search any way I want, find exactly what I am looking for in seconds. There's a "Gold Mine" of information and opportunities which I now have at my fingertips.

Case in Point:

We had gotten an order for some IBM Token Ring Boards, that our client needed. We had none in stock, so, I search our Email Database, and found 2 references of suppliers who had them in stock. Our client paid us well for them, because they don't make that type anymore, and our supplier was more than happy to give them away. [Grin]

In Closing:

Today Information Technology has pushed the limits of older database programs. I'm not saying that askSam doesn't have it's little quarks, But compare to the others I have used, it works.

The database of today is an InfoBase; a database that can handle all types of information in any format, and have the ability to have large file sizes, do searches, create reports, and be able to extract any part of the data quickly and effectively.

PS: You should see what we are doing with news groups.

Emails Welcomed.

Best Regards,

Richard Nagle

CMS

Pres./CEO

352-726-7700

Cms01@tampabay.rr.com