ml>> why would you /have/ to renumber? the DOS 8.3 system can
 ml>> count from 0 thru 99999999 before wrapping... that's a lot
 ml>> of messages :wink:  imagine

 MMD>     Well, most people  rather not possibly keep over 99
 MMD> billion messages on their hard drives.

>

 MMD> Most of the older equipment I have have small hard drives.
 MMD> Thus its a trade off between disk space and the number of
 MMD> messages I carry.

the number of messages and the message numbers are two different things...
i've one base here (automotive) that contains 18 "active"
messages but the first message number used is 89087 and that's since that
base was initialized back in 1994... i've another base here (one of my beta
areas) that contains 19383 messages and its starting number is 4920 which
means that i lost that many messages due to purging and packing when i
forgot to set that base to retain all messages...

its all in how you want to operate, too... many people simply don't realize
that things may be able to be done another way...

FWIW: the current config on my stats program shows 198 message areas
containing 42415 messages... that's "only" 62megs... its been a
while since i looked at that figure... glad i'm not "stuck"
running on those 40meggers i used to run on...

)\/(ark