Use a Smart Folder to remove certain iChat log files

May 08, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

With family, friends, and coworkers scattered around the country and the world, iChat is one of my most-used applications. Given that a lot of important conversations flow through it, I've archived my iChat logs for years using the "Automatically save chat transcripts" feature in iChat. One annoyance, though, comes courtesy of the VPN we use to reach the Macworld servers. Every time I connect and disconnect from the VPN (many times a day), AOL generates a warning that shows up as a new iChat message:

Your screen name is now signed into AOL(R) Instant Messenger (TM) in 2 locations. To sign off the other location(s), reply to this message with the number 1. Click here for more information.
Of course, each and every one of these messages is logged, though I clearly don't need to save them. To make it simpler to get rid of these extraneous logged files, I created a Smart Folder with the following search criteria, with "Any of the following are true" at the top level: For whatever reason (related to being on or not on the VPN, perhaps?), there are two different names for the sender of the message from AOL, so I search for both names. Once I set up the search, I dropped it in the Search For section of my sidebar. Deleting these saved chats now only takes a couple of mouse clicks and keystrokes. There are other more automated ways to do this -- some sort of find command run as a launchd task or cron job comes to mind, but this method was simple and fast.

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