dbishop@kodak.com (David Bishop) spake: >I typically download elements at work, put them on a PC floppy and run >them on Quicksat on my PC at home. One thing that I need is a good >satellite elements digester, something that can read e-mail messages, >pull out elements, sort them, and put them into a file. If you you're running UNIX or have a UNIXlike set of utilities, grep '^[12] [012][0-9]' mailfile > elefile will extract the two-line elements pretty well. You then have to get them into the three-line form used by most tracking programs. The shareware ASCII editor PCWrite will do this handily, or you can use a small perl script or QBASIC program. Here's an example of a qbasic program which will extract elements and put them into three-line form (I'm writing this freeform, so there may be a bug or three; the general idea should be clear.) OPEN "MAILFILE" FOR INPUT AS #1 OPEN "ELEFILE" AS #2 WHILE NOT EOF(1) LINE INPUT #1, A$ IF LEFT$(A$,2) = "1 " AND LEN(A$) = 69 THEN LINE0$ = MID$(A$,3,6) LINE1$ = A$ ELSEIF LEFT$(A$,2) = "2 " AND LEN(A$) = 69 THEN PRINT #2, LINE0$ PRINT #2, LINE1$ PRINT #2, A$ ELSE LINE0$ = "" LINE1$ = "" END IF WEND CLOSE END The LEN$(A$) = 69 is a validity checker. You can AND in others, such as position of literals, decimal points and blanks if you like, but I've found that that's not really needed. If you want to do sort and uniq on the elsets, I recommend putting them into "one-line" form ( LINE1$ + " N " + LINE2$ is what I use ), process them, and reconvert when it comes time to use them in prediction programs.