engines and correspondence chess

ever wondered what the best program, aka 'engine' is
for correspondence chess ? Well with Chessbase engines
like Fritz 8, Shredder, Junior etc. it is possible to use
a correspondence mode, and let your comp krunch
the whole knight about a variant.

But what is it doing then ? Well, after a certain number
of moves, it simply continues, and makes a tree
for a number of subvariants (which you can choose
in the options). Now ideally such a tree would
be backsolved according to an alfa-beta algorithm,
whereby transpositions also are taken into account.

Is the Chessbase program doing that ?
No sir, it's not !

A whole big tree is calculated for all kinds of
variants, which can contain many transpositions,
and then a complete minimax is done. This
means *lots* of inferior variants are calculated into
much more depth than necessary; a waste of time !!

No, probably with an engine as DeepShredder, and a
powerful multiprocessor machine would be more
useful for the postal chess player, just by going
to the variants manually, scrolling back and
forth through the variants, and letting the hash
tables 'remember' the results (i.e. evaluation).

Still at higher levels it might help to have some
knowledge about endgame strategy, to find
the best lines during the middlegame.
Engines probably are just an aid, just like
a GM as J.Piket most likely recently has been
for the brandnew world champ correspondence
chess Van Oosterom.. ( a patzer anyway, as
he usually is opening with 1.d4?!).