Eudora in trouble, even in the new open source form. Another user drops it, in favour of Apple Mail seattletimes.nwsource.com
<By Jeff Carlson
Special to The Seattle Times
After more than a decade, I've switched e-mail programs.
This shift is more than just substituting one piece of software for another. I interact with e-mail almost every day, all day — it's my main professional connection to the outside world. (I know, I need to get out more.)
But the old program, Qualcomm's Eudora 6.2.4 (www.eudora.com), just wasn't working anymore in a number of ways, so even though it feels at times as if I've had a brain transplant, the change had to happen.
There are plenty of e-mail programs for the Mac, but I decided to go with the home team: Apple's built-in Mail.
Eudora remains a capable e-mail client for now. That's actually surprising, as Eudora has not been actively developed or supported for a couple of years. The plan is that Eudora's functionality will be rolled into Mozilla Thunderbird, but the progress on that front has been extremely slow; a beta of Eudora 8 is available, but it's not ready for regular use.
Eudora still works mostly well on my Intel-based MacBook Pro, but it's brittle, crashing occasionally for no reason. At some point I'm sure it will no longer work, and I don't want to be stuck when that day arrives.
It's not just obsolescence that has pushed me away, though. I've also rethought the way I deal with my e-mail.
I had reached a point where filing my e-mail was bogging me down. Years of building a folder-based file system meant that filing a message occupied just enough time and effort to get in the way. Eudora's filing approach is all menu-specific; to file a message from a Seattle Times reader, for example, I had to select the message, go to the Transfer menu, highlight my Seattle Times sub menu, then choose my Practical Mac mailbox. The alternative was to have all my mailboxes open in one window and drag the message to the right one. That's just too much mousing.
In this sense, Mail isn't much better, requiring that I drag messages to mailboxes. However, I solved that problem by installing MsgFiler (www.tow.com/msgfiler/), an $8 shareware plug-in that gives me the capability to press Command-9, type the name of a folder, and hit Return. (Finally, the best feature of the dear departed Claris E-mailer returns.)... continued.... >
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