ROM Computer Magazine Archive ROM MAGAZINE ISSUE 5 — APRIL/MAY 1984 / PAGE 10

MAGIC MAIL
Reviewed By Peter Ellison

    This is the mailing list that we have all been waiting for. This program called "Magic Mail" from ABBS is so simple to use even a small child could use it. When I first received it I was surprised to find out how simple it was to operate. I barely looked at the 54 page instruction booklet to get a pretty good understanding of the product.
    This program will make life a lot easier for either the person in the home or business, with its' great speed (100% machine language) to store or retrieve names and addresses. There are eight different fields that information can be entered in. They are Name, Street Address, City/ Town, State, Zipcode, Phone number(including area code), Birthday(Day/date/year), and an Entry status.There are lines after each field showing how much space is available for each field. When you get near the end of the current Data field, Magic Mail even lets out a quiet beep to let you know.
    You can store over a 1000 entries on each single-sided Density Disk and can also have an unlimited number of DATA Disks in your system. There are so many features in this program that when you are using it, Magic Mail makes you feel like you're using a highly sophisticated business computer. One of these excellent features is the FIND command.This command allows the user to find any entry in a matter of a second. I have used many mailing lists and have waited many hours to find one of my addresses. One thing that makes the FIND command so fast is, it can search right through the current Data File using multiple Data Fields as the search criteria.The 'OR' or 'AND' is user specified.
    Another feature that I have found useful, not usually found in most Databases, is the ability to edit by using the cursor control keys to go back up a field that needs correction or was left out. Also when booting up the disk, it didn't take more than 15 seconds, when many of the others took nearly a minute. Once the disk is booted, a Built-In help menu appears, making it easy to get started quickly. This menu can be accessed at any time by just pressing "<" while in the data entry mode. By using this menu, one can sort or reorganize mailing list I have used, which took nearly a minute. Once the disk is booted, a Built-In help help menu appears, making it easy to get started quickly. This menu can be accessed at any time by just pressing a "<" while in the data entry mode. By using this menu, one can Sort or reorganize the entries in any Database by any field.The limit on the number of entries that you may sort is determined by the amount of memory on your computer. The average sort time for a very large file is only 20-30 seconds.
    This product has so many different features I could write a ten page review of it and still have more to say. For the moment, however, I will just tell about one last feature. This is one that allows the computer to do all of your phone dialing. It will automatically dial any number in your database by simply placing the touch tone phone over or near your Television monitor speaker and press Control 'D' while the desired entry is displayed on your screen. Just think of all the time that can be saved never having to dial another number. In closing, all I can say is that 'Magic Mail' is a very excellent Mailing List program and is the last one you'll ever need. This program is available from:

ABBS
P.O. BOX 2452
SYRACUSE,NEW YORK
13220