[VM] One way VM helps with records

[Uday Reddy]

I always keep an eye out for some of the interesting things I do with 
VM.  Here is one that I think is cute.

For some Governmental red tape, I had to submit a list of all my 
absences from the country going back to 2000.  My first idea was to look 
through my passport for all the arrival/departure stamps that the 
immigration officers put.  It was a bit of a pain to gather all that, 
but in the end I got most of what I wanted.  But there were a few 
significant gaps and some of them turned out to be crucial.

I used to keep a Unix/Emacs calendar file and some of the information I 
needed was there.  But around 2004, I had to switch to Microsoft Outlook 
for my diary for some independent reasons, and all those records 
essentially got lost during OS upgrades, disk failures and what not.

Then it occurred to me that, we have a practice of sending an "absence" 
message to all the departmental staff whenever we go out of town, and a 
helpful colleague wrote a script to file all such messages into an mbox 
on the central file space.

Problem solved.  Once I found those mbox folders, all I had to do was to 
visit them in VM and do

  V C author Uday

and I had an essentially full record of all my absences going back to 2000.

If only I had the idea from the beginning, I could have saved hours 
worth of work I spent in going through all the passport pages and 
tabulating the immigration stamps.

Email is amazingly valuable, and VM lets us use it effectively.

Please feel free to share your own interesting stories!

Cheers,
Uday