wilkes

The card file system is good with me. I loved Dewey Decimal and was a dedicated librarian's asst. back in the old days in school.

AOL, BRG. The reason I am asking, it that I forwarded an e-mail the other day that had all the scribble and other giberish on it. I thought that I had cleaned it up so that only the "real" part of the message would go through. I recieved a reply from the recipent, asking me not to forward anything like that, because it was clogging up their memory...thus, it got me to thinking...does my hard drive have a bunch of the same type stuff taking up memory space?

As for the Homeland Security folks...I really do not worry about them...they are all busy listening in on first2know's computer and phone lines! So all the plans on my computer to rob Ft. Knox are pretty secure, I'm sure.

Thanks.

Do you mean remove it so the Average Joe can't find it?

Or Homeland Security can't find it?

What do you use for sending and receiving email? A client like Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Pegasus Mail? Or do you just go online through Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, webmail.embarq.net (?) to get your email jollies?

So, bottom line...where I have exchanged funnies over the years with folks, swapped recipes, sent an e-mail with four or five other's rendention of that same e-mail, when I open an e-mail with 50 million attachments, does it stay on my hard drive, and if it does is there a simple way to remove it? Remember my origional post...I know where the on/off switch is...and that's about it. Sorry...old school...still use my fingers and toes to count with!

Here's a little analogy that has served me well in the past.

Think about your hard drive as a library, but instead of book you have files. Now, in the library you have the card catalog (old school I know, but hang on). The books on the shelves are in no particular order (biographies are mixed in with the cook books, how-to books are mixed in with the political essays, etc), almost totally random (like the files on a hard drive).

So, you decide there is a book you don't need any more. You go to the card catalog, remove and destroy the card. When you delete a file on your hard drive, all you are deleting is the information (the card from the catalog) that tells the hard drive were the file is, not the file itself.

Guess what? The file (book) is still here. It's a whole lot harder to find but still there. With enough time, you can find the book. Same thing on a hard drive, with the right program(s) (and time), you can find that deleted file. Unless, that book has randomly been removed from the shelf and replaced with another book (a new file has been written to the same area(s) as the old file).

Terribly oversimplified, but the easiest way to explain it.

I have always wanted to ask exactly how the police find things in a murder case or criminal case on a computer hard drive. It seems if they could find it any computer genius could.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Darik's Boot and Nuke ("DBAN") is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.

drag and drop an item into the recycle bin then right click on (or double click it to open it) the recycle bin and click on "empty recycle bin" its pretty much gone as far as hard drive space is concerned.
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ummm! unless its child p**n ,details of a murder , tax fraud then they have special programs that will dig that stuff up
... email if you use ...outlook.. its saved in the program on your hard drive
if you use charter ,hotmail ,yahoo,google.ect its only saved in storage on that acct unless you save it to a folder on your pc. it can be confusing

"Also, once I have deleted a P/M on GW, is there anyway that I can restore that particular message back to the sent/inbox area?"

Let's tackle the easy one first.

Deleting PM's is a two step process. Select the PM(s), then move them to the Deleted folder. They still exist at this point (in the Deleted folder). To "permanently" delete them, go to the Delete folder, select the PM's and move them to the Deleted folder (again).

I say "permanently" because you (the user) can't access them anymore, but I'm not sure of the GW archiving procedure.

Question for anyone...and remember all I know about computer's is where the on/off switch is!

Do deleted e-mails, whether they be from GW or any other source, i.e., AOL, remain on your hard drive, and if so how can you remove them (or for that matter, anything else), so that they do not take up some of the memory space?

Also, once I have deleted a P/M on GW, is there anyway that I can restore that particular message back to the sent/inbox area?

Thanks for any help in advance.