I believe the mail.dat file stores info on messages recieved if online or not. My experience is that if it gets to large, it doesn't affect the lag, but prevents people from logging in. If you delete this, you will miss messages generated by alien/player fig hits, cannon hits, and anything else that generates a message prior to the delete. I don't know if most players read this stuff if they log in to catch up, but you might miss a message that you've zapped another player with your canon while you were away.

Macro:
c    m    : y   q

Assign it, love it, use it. Problem I think are the players that are #SD#. Don't you still collect messages even with dead? I always seem to. In a big unlim alien game most of those guys aren't coming back just to delete their msgs.

It might be easier if players took it upon themselves to delete their messages. Usually two keystrokes, sometimes more will take care of all of them w/o having to look at them. I know this is asking a lot and I don't know if the messages are actually removed from the .dat file when we trash them.

I had a brainstorming idea, I don't think it is really feasible but figured it was worth throwing out there at any rate. Is there a way to check through windows systems via (VBScript, JScript, or similar) if a file is open (if so tell it to close, if not in actual use at the time of the check) otherwise if it in being written to/read from, (have your script wait until it is free again) If that is possible then this idea could work so long as TWGS has a redundant type of check that ensure the file is open before trying to write to it, which may not even be necessary, as the source language may do this inherently anyway. Though problems may still arise if TWGS attempts to read/write, while the utility is cleaning up the file, unless TWGS first runs a check to ensure the file is available. Then the script would be used to interact with the utility or visa versa.