Switching from Eudora to Mail?

At 11:44 AM -0700 6/17/04, Evans Brasfield wrote:
>The poll about which email client I use got me thinking about the
>fact that I haven't made a stab at using Mail in over a year. I've
>been a Eudora user for too many years to count, but I've grown weary
>of their annual upgrade pricing. Perhaps if I felt I was getting
>more out of the upgrades, I wouldn't mind paying $39, but I decided
>I should check out Mail before paying to move up to 6.1 and
>(hopefully) losing the annoying Eudora processor hogging habit when
>checking mail. In short, Eudora's slow development in OS X has
>turned me from an evangelist into someone who keeps looking around
>then grudgingly returns with a sigh to the devil that I already know.
>
>Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
><http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13341> made the
>process pretty painless. In my previous attempts to move to Mail,
>transferring all of my filters, or rather, my unwillingness to
>reenter all of my filters as rules, kept me out for more than a few
>days. So, after a day of using Mail, I'm not unhappy. Years of habit
>will need to change before I'm comfortable (How do I delete one
>message and open the next with a single command?), but so far, not
>so bad. Some nits, like not being able to assign a signature to my
>business account's messages, but much better than my last attempt.
>
>Now to a question: For years, I've checked my mail while lying on my
>couch using my tired, old Wallstreet and double clicking on an alias
>of the Eudora Settings file. It's mounted my user directory desktop
>in my office and let me run Eudora on those files, eliminating the
>need to worry about having to synchronize anything. (If I forgot to
>quit Eudora before leaving my office, I use Timbuktu to shut down
>the offending application.) I haven't found a file for Mail that
>will let me accomplish the same thing. Does anyone else have an
>idea? I'm typing this prone on the couch via Timbuktu, but the
>difference in screen sizes makes it anything but a pleasant textual
>experience.

If you're comfortable installing Unix software, you can install an
IMAP server on the machine you keep your mail on and use Mail as an
IMAP client. All the mail then resides on one machine but can be
read and manipulated from any other. My G5 runs courier-imap
<http://www.courier-mta.org> and serves my mail to clients on my Palm
and other Macs.

Otherwise, this sounds like a job for AppleScript. Write a script
that mounts your home and then launches Mail.

--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

On 6/17/2004 11:44 AM, "Evans Brasfield" <evansb2charter.net> wrote:
> Some nits, like not being able to assign a signature to my business account's
> messages, but much better than my last attempt.

If I'm understanding you, you should check out MailEnhancer, which lets you
assign signatures to email accounts:

    If you have a signature with the name set to your email address,
    then it will use that signature when you send from that address.

<http://home.insightbb.com/~n9yty1/MailEnhancer/>

--
----------------------------------
Get some Mac OS X Power Tools:
Second Edition available now!
<http://www.MacOSXPowerTools.com/>
----------------------------------

On Jun 17, 2004, at 12:13 PM, Paul Schinder wrote:

> If you're comfortable installing Unix software, you can install an
> IMAP server on the machine you keep your mail on and use Mail as an
> IMAP client. All the mail then resides on one machine but can be read
> and manipulated from any other. My G5 runs courier-imap
> <http://www.courier-mta.org> and serves my mail to clients on my Palm
> and other Macs.
>
> Otherwise, this sounds like a job for AppleScript. Write a script
> that mounts your home and then launches Mail.
>

Thanks, but I think this may be beyond me. At first glance, it looks
like a full-on mail server. Would it also be able to check the mail for
my POP accounts and hold it locally? Or do I have my mail forwarded to
this server's address? When I have down time, I'll read the docs.

On Jun 17, 2004, at 12:25 PM, Dan Frakes wrote:
> If I'm understanding you, you should check out MailEnhancer, which
> lets you
> assign signatures to email accounts:
>
> If you have a signature with the name set to your email address,
> then it will use that signature when you send from that address.
>
> <http://home.insightbb.com/~n9yty1/MailEnhancer/>

Perfect!

At 11:44 AM -0700 2004/06/17, Evans Brasfield wrote:
>The poll about which email client I use got me thinking about the
>fact that I haven't made a stab at using Mail in over a year. I've
>been a Eudora user for too many years to count, but I've grown weary
>of their annual upgrade pricing. Perhaps if I felt I was getting
>more out of the upgrades, I wouldn't mind paying $39, but I decided
>I should check out Mail before paying to move up to 6.1 and
>(hopefully) losing the annoying Eudora processor hogging habit when
>checking mail. In short, Eudora's slow development in OS X has
>turned me from an evangelist into someone who keeps looking around
>then grudgingly returns with a sigh to the devil that I already know.
>
>Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
><http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13341> made the
>process pretty painless. In my previous attempts to move to Mail,
>transferring all of my filters, or rather, my unwillingness to
>reenter all of my filters as rules, kept me out for more than a few
>days. So, after a day of using Mail, I'm not unhappy. Years of habit
>will need to change before I'm comfortable (How do I delete one
>message and open the next with a single command?), but so far, not
>so bad. Some nits, like not being able to assign a signature to my
>business account's messages, but much better than my last attempt.
>
>Now to a question: For years, I've checked my mail while lying on my
>couch using my tired, old Wallstreet and double clicking on an alias
>of the Eudora Settings file. It's mounted my user directory desktop
>in my office and let me run Eudora on those files, eliminating the
>need to worry about having to synchronize anything. (If I forgot to
>quit Eudora before leaving my office, I use Timbuktu to shut down
>the offending application.) I haven't found a file for Mail that
>will let me accomplish the same thing. Does anyone else have an
>idea? I'm typing this prone on the couch via Timbuktu, but the
>difference in screen sizes makes it anything but a pleasant textual
>experience.

        You can quit Eudora via a one-line AppleScript, using
"osascript -e" command from the Terminal, but I only did it once a
few years ago, and don't remember the exact AppleScript incantation.

>Will this be the deal breaker?

        Try mounting your desktop's home directory from your Wall
Street, and then (while Mail isn't running!) try something like (on
the PB):

cd ~/Library
mv Mail Mail.pb
ln -s /Volumes/desktop/Users/evans/Library/Mail

        This should create a symlink named Mail in Library on the PB,
which Mail.app *might* use to get your mail via AppleShare.

        You can definitely mount your entire home directory over the
network, but the performance would probably stink, and you'd lose
everything if the AirPort connection dropped out.

                                                Chris
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>

On 17 Jun 2004, at 14:09, Evans Brasfield wrote:
> On Jun 17, 2004, at 12:13 PM, Paul Schinder wrote:
>
>> If you're comfortable installing Unix software, you can install an
>> IMAP server on the machine you keep your mail on and use Mail as an
>> IMAP client. All the mail then resides on one machine but can be
>> read and manipulated from any other. My G5 runs courier-imap
>> <http://www.courier-mta.org> and serves my mail to clients on my Palm
>> and other Macs.
>>
>> Otherwise, this sounds like a job for AppleScript. Write a script
>> that mounts your home and then launches Mail.
>>
>
> Thanks, but I think this may be beyond me. At first glance, it looks
> like a full-on mail server. Would it also be able to check the mail
> for my POP accounts and hold it locally? Or do I have my mail
> forwarded to this server's address? When I have down time, I'll read
> the docs.

What I did for quit a long time (OS X PB to 10.2 or so)

I ran fetchmail on my OS X machine to download all my mail from POP
accounts. Then I had uw-imap running on OS X as my local IMAP server,
which Mail.app (or anything else, squirrelmail, etc) connected to.

You could use Courier or Cyrus instead of uw-imap, but uw-imap is very
basic and small and fast and doesn't have extra bells and whistles
(which, incidentally, mail.app doesn't support anyway). I did this
until I upgraded my mailserver to a freeBSD machine and put postfix and
uw-imap on it. Now mail.app connects directly to the IMAP server, but
the fetchmail process worked very well for quite a long time.

> On Jun 17, 2004, at 12:25 PM, Dan Frakes wrote:
>> If I'm understanding you, you should check out MailEnhancer, which
>> lets you
>> assign signatures to email accounts:
>>
>> If you have a signature with the name set to your email address,
>> then it will use that signature when you send from that address.
>>
>> <http://home.insightbb.com/~n9yty1/MailEnhancer/>
>
> Perfect!

Be aware of one problem, using mailenhancer will allow you ONLY to set
a signature to an email address. That is, if you have one business
address with a signature set by ME you can't have your personal account
set to "random" (or anything by userdomain.tld). It will simply
default to 'none' all the time.

By the way, this hint provided at macosxhints might help with quitting an app remotely via AppleScript:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040611103530635

Louie

I have hesitated to use Mail because it does not appear to allow for threading within dates. Eudora does this through Group Messages within a larger Sort category. Mail will highlight all the the messages in the thread, but it is necessary to scroll through a mailbox to find the messages. Has anyone found a way to replicate the Eudora threading in Mail?

Martha

On Jun 23, 2004, at 15:58, Martha wrote:

> I have hesitated to use Mail because it does not appear to allow for
> threading within dates. Eudora does this through Group Messages within
> a larger Sort category. Mail will highlight all the the messages in
> the thread, but it is necessary to scroll through a mailbox to find
> the messages. Has anyone found a way to replicate the Eudora threading
> in Mail?

Get a newer version of Mail. It now has message threading. In the View
menu there's a command, "Organize by Thread". I've forgotten when it
was introduced, but I have version 1.3.8 and am using Mac OS X 10.3.4
(Panther).

--
Chris Page - Software Wrangler - Dylan Pundit

  That's "Chris" with a silent *and* invisible "3".

I absolutely agree with Evans on his thoughts about Eudora which seems to have gone from Mac-excellent to Mac-indifferent.

Last week I took the big jump; converting thousands of mails dating back to 1995 from Eudora to Mail.app. Habits aside, I'm fairly happy about Mail.app which does not seem as slow as it did last year when I tried to convert (but now my processor is 1,5 GHz instead of 550 Mhz ... ;-] )

Anyway, my big question is:

How can I get that smooth Eudora-feeling of moving around between mails and mailboxes using short cuts instead of mouse. I find it really annoying to be forced to use my mouse to get to the top of a mailbox of e.g. 1.000 emails if I happen to end up in the middle of the mailbox.

Dear Apple, why don't you make a few short cuts, like Ctrl-Alt-ArrowUp to be able to go to the top of a list of mail in a mailbox.

Likewise, it would be logical to be able to control the list of mailboxes from the keyboard without any interference from a mouse. Why not thoroughly apply the splendid navigational principles from Finder so that you can choose between mailboxes in the mailbox list by using arrows, and so that you expand a mailbox with other mailboxes inside by using Ctrl-ArrowRight etc etc.

Or is it just lazy me? :chagrin:

/jesper

----- Original Message -----
> I absolutely agree with Evans on his thoughts about Eudora which seems to have gone from
> Mac-excellent to Mac-indifferent.

I just donwloaded Eudora 6.1 to take a look at it. it lasted less
than 5 minutes on my HD before I trashed it. There were, for me, two
show-stopping problems right off the bat. First off, it would not
allow me to paste my email password into the password dialog. My
passwords are random 8-15 character strings that change monthly. I am
not typing those in to Eudora's dialog box everytime they need
updating.

Second, it refused to connect to the mailserver, which requires a
login of "userdomain.tld" and Eudora will either do
"Usermaildomain.tld" (wrong) or "userdomain.tldmaildomain.tld" (so
wrong it's flabergasting).

> How can I get that smooth Eudora-feeling of moving around between mails and mailboxes
> using short cuts instead of mouse. I find it really annoying to be forced to use my mouse
> to get to the top of a mailbox of e.g. 1.000 emails if I happen to end up in the middle of
> the mailbox.

Mail.app is a terrible mail client, it just happens to be just about
the best on OS X. It could be leaps and bounds better, but despite
its failings in quite a lot of areas, it strikes the right balance
between useful, stable, simple, and useful. It's no Cyberdog. it
lacks many very basic features (like there is no "Next" command,
keyboard shortcut, or tool, I think it is unique in that particular
peculiarity).

> Likewise, it would be logical to be able to control the list of mailboxes from the keyboard
> without any interference from a mouse.

Yes, agreed. Mail.app is one application that is dying to be 100%
keyboard controllable.

I also wish it did a much better job of keeping the number of new
messages in a mailbox updated, especially since i use procmail to sort
mail directly into the mailboxes (I have no mail.app filters).

--
gkreme at gmail or kreme at kreme or syth at mac

On 6/25/2004 11:46, "Biberkopf" <soholmbiberkopf.dk> wrote:

> I absolutely agree with Evans on his thoughts about Eudora which seems to have
> gone from Mac-excellent to Mac-indifferent.

Well, Eudora began life on Macintosh (in an always-connected environment),
and was excellent. By the time I found Eudora (around 1992, with the
remarkably convoluted licensing system that was used then for outsiders) it
was still excellent (and had learned about dialup). The only direction it
could go was toward less excellent.

  --John

On Jun 17, 2004, at 12:44 PM, Evans Brasfield wrote:

> Now to a question: For years, I've checked my mail while lying on my
> couch using my tired, old Wallstreet and double clicking on an alias
> of the Eudora Settings file. It's mounted my user directory desktop in
> my office and let me run Eudora on those files, eliminating the need
> to worry about having to synchronize anything. (If I forgot to quit
> Eudora before leaving my office, I use Timbuktu to shut down the
> offending application.) I haven't found a file for Mail that will let
> me accomplish the same thing. Does anyone else have an idea? I'm
> typing this prone on the couch via Timbuktu, but the difference in
> screen sizes makes it anything but a pleasant textual experience.
>
> Will this be the deal breaker?

Depending on what you're trying to synchronize, you have a few options.

For address book information, you can use iSync. That's probably the
easiest method.

For email, you can do a couple of things. One, is make a symbolic link
from your ~/Library/Mail/ directory on one computer to that on the
other, thus it will use the mailbox cache/storage files in common for
all your mail. Alternately, use an IMAP email service (such as
Fastmail, or .Mac), which will let you store all your email on the
server, and your mail programs will synchronize the latest changes each
time they connect.

For general settings data (signatures, rules, etc...) that's a little
harder.

Personally, since I access my email from no fewer than three computers
regularly, and sometimes others, I have come to rely on Fastmail's
service, as I can store my email (via IMAP) on the server, and can
manage all my rules and spam filtering server-side, so that all my
email program serves as is a tool for composing and reading mail.

--Nik

On 28 Jun, 2004, at 12:01, John W. Baxter wrote:

> On 6/25/2004 11:46, "Biberkopf" <soholmbiberkopf.dk> wrote:
>
>> I absolutely agree with Evans on his thoughts about Eudora which
>> seems to have
>> gone from Mac-excellent to Mac-indifferent.
>
> Well, Eudora began life on Macintosh (in an always-connected
> environment),
> and was excellent. By the time I found Eudora (around 1992, with the
> remarkably convoluted licensing system that was used then for
> outsiders) it
> was still excellent (and had learned about dialup). The only
> direction it
> could go was toward less excellent.

In Western society & business, yes, I have to agree with you except for
a very few exceptional cases.

In Japan; increasingly in other Asian countries too, the old 'If it
ain't broke don't fix it' motto is unknown in that form. It is more
like: 'If it ain't broke, look after it carefully today; improve it
even more each week and revolutionise it within a decade.'

The 'Careful looking after' is done on the shop floor. The 'Improving'
is done in a private office or workshop. The 'Revolution' is an
'Edisonian' culmination of years of steps a 1,000th inch at a time.

But the other SE Asian counties use our style of creative thinking too,
so watch out! Double jeopardy.

> --John

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004 12:01:04 -0700, John W. Baxter <jwblistolympus.net> wrote:
> On 6/25/2004 11:46, "Biberkopf" <soholmbiberkopf.dk> wrote:
>
> > I absolutely agree with Evans on his thoughts about Eudora which seems to have
> > gone from Mac-excellent to Mac-indifferent.
>
> Well, Eudora began life on Macintosh (in an always-connected environment),
> and was excellent. .... The only direction it could go was toward less excellent.

Eudora was a very good email client and I used it for many many years.
 In fact, for about 13 years, I think from 1987ish to 2000. As it
aged, it failed to keep up, and this was evident even before OS X with
its very slow and half-hearted acceptance of IMAP.

The move to OS X _should_ have given Qualcomm a opportunity to really
revamp Eudora's interface and learn something from the last 5 years or
so of email interfaces. Instead we got exactly the same client with
exactly the same look, a look that was, frankly, inappropriate for OS
X where spawning lots of windows is _not_ the best interface. OS X
really wants apps to _minimize_ the number of windows. This is a
simple usability issue since windows from multiple apps can
interleave. Having one app that spawns 10 windows means it is using
up a disproportionate amount of the screen and quite likely impeding
the use of other apps.

What they should have done is adopted a single mailbox window with a
drawer that showed all the mailboxes and the window showing the
messages in the current mailbox, then showed the current message in
its own window (or in the preview pane for people who like that sort
of thing.

From what I saw of Eudora 6.0, there was a sort of half-hearted
attempt at this sort of interface, but it was, from what I would see,
rather poorly implemented.

Then there are a host of little issues. Eudora doesn't use the OS X
built in text editing library, so the OS X spellcheck is not
available, and any tools that work with that library (like the
excellent aspell) are also unavailable. IMAP support is still at bare
minimum (or lower) levels. the options interface looks exactly like
it did 15 years ago, despite at least an order or magnitude more
complexion. Finding the right pref setting in Eudora can take an
exceedingly long time, and even in the best of cases it is burdensome,
with some prefs being in "Sending Mail" but others in "Personalities",
depending on if you are setting prefs for "the" account, or the "ugly
stepchildren" other accounts.

My recent experience with being unable to get eudora to send
"usermydoamin.tld" as the login name instead of "user" or
"usermydoman.tldmail.mailhost.tdl" was just another example in how
little progress Eudora has made.

If all your accounts are POP3 and none require special authentication
and everything is exactly as it would have been in 1992, then Eudora
still seems to work fine. Anything other than that, however, and
Eudora starts showing the multiple levels of lath and plaster than
have been used to make a early 90's era app look like a early 00's
app.

I still wear my Qualcomm/Eudora demin jacket though :)

--
gkreme at gmail or kreme at kreme or syth at mac

Google Kreme <gkremegmail.com>:
>The move to OS X _should_ have given Qualcomm a opportunity to really
>revamp Eudora's interface and learn something from the last 5 years or
>so of email interfaces. Instead we got exactly the same client with
>exactly the same look,

Call me stodgy, but this is a huge bonus IMO. The OS X native Eudora came out just as I started to seriously move some of my workload into OS X. I downloaded it, fired it up, and said, "Thank God! Here's something familiar!"

> a look that was, frankly, inappropriate for OS
>X where spawning lots of windows is _not_ the best interface.

I suppose not, but I still prefer my email to work that way.

> OS X
>really wants apps to _minimize_ the number of windows. This is a
>simple usability issue since windows from multiple apps can
>interleave. Having one app that spawns 10 windows means it is using
>up a disproportionate amount of the screen and quite likely impeding
>the use of other apps.
>
>What they should have done is adopted a single mailbox window with a
>drawer that showed all the mailboxes and the window showing the
>messages in the current mailbox,

I *hate* that. I hated it when a saw it in Netscape Mail (as frames, of course, not a drawer), I hated it in Entourage, and I hate it in Mail.app (which I've spent many days with, really trying to love it). This is all my opinion, of course, but I hate having mailboxes listed on the side with their contents showing up in a single pane when you click their little icon. I love having them represented as windows rather than little folders, and I'm not sure I can explain why. Probably simply because I've used Eudora for ten years and that's the way I expect my mail to work. I love having the mailboxes as separate windows where I can peek at the contents of one without closing the one I'm seriously working in.

The bevy of windows approach matches well with the way I work with my email. Incoming mail is filtered into the appropriate mailbox, which opens as a window. I get to glance at it and decide how badly I want to read it. I can open it now, I can close the mailbox if there's nothing new that I want to see in the near future, or, and this happens most often, I will glance at the mailbox, then pull my inbox or whatever I'm writing to the the front without closing the new mailbox. This way, it moves on back out of my way but I don't forget to read those messages when I'm done with what I'm currently doing. In this manner I prioritize my work, with less important stuff gradually migrating to the back. More important stuff is closed as I finish with it, and everything eventually gets attention without me forgetting anything or having to open a drawer and shop for icons that indicate new mail and then click on them. With about 40 mailboxes, that would be much more annoying to me than the 4-6 mailbox windows which typically receive mail on most days lurking about on my desktop.

Cluttered? I suppose; but exposé alleviates that pretty well. F10 shows 11 Eudora windows at the moment.

> then showed the current message in
>its own window (or in the preview pane for people who like that sort
>of thing.

...AND don't even get me started on preview panes.

All of this is, of course, my own opinion only and I'm certainly not trying to tout my way of working over any one else's, just to describe the way I like to get my email done, and if Eudora ever abandons the separate window approach altogether, then I'll be very sad.

There are many things about Eudora that bug me from time to time, so I try just about every big new email program that comes down the pike, but its interface suits me perfectly, and that is why I always return.

--
Greg Sigman, Senior Library Associate
Ohio University Music/Dance Library
sigmanohio.edu

>The move to OS X _should_ have given Qualcomm a opportunity to really
>revamp Eudora's interface and learn something from the last 5 years or
>so of email interfaces. Instead we got exactly the same client with
>exactly the same look, a look that was, frankly, inappropriate for OS
>X where spawning lots of windows is _not_ the best interface. OS X
>really wants apps to _minimize_ the number of windows.

But then it would be just like Entourage, or Mail.app. Yawn.

Some us actually *like* and prefer that behavior, thank you.

If I wanted to use NeXTMail, er mail.app or Entourage, I would. As it
is I still use Eudora... the same way I have used Eudora since I had
lots of hair on my head and my teenager was not yet born.

"New" doesn't necessarily mean "better"... it is just "different"

>This is a simple usability issue since windows from multiple apps can
>interleave. Having one app that spawns 10 windows means it is using
>up a disproportionate amount of the screen and quite likely impeding
>the use of
>other apps.

Oddly enough that has never been an issue for me, and I frequently
have many many windows from many many apps open. App switching and
app hiding provide, or the "window" menu provide a simple UI for
handling this with ease. Panther's UI made several subtle changes
that render your objections minor.

I for one, am happy to have this choice, rather than being forced
into a single email UI.

Regards,

--
Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
_________________________________________________________________
digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001
where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-425-483-0483
19515 North Creek Parkway Fax: +1-425-482-6871
Suite 208 http://www.forest.net
Bothell, WA 98011 email: cgforest.net

--On Thursday, July 1, 2004 7:05 AM -0700 Greg Sigman <sigmanohio.edu>
wrote:
> The bevy of windows approach matches well with the way I work with my
> email. Incoming mail is filtered into the appropriate mailbox, which
> opens as a window. I get to glance at it and decide how badly I want to
> read it. I can open it now, I can close the mailbox if there's nothing
> new that I want to see in the near future, or, and this happens most
> often, I will glance at the mailbox, then pull my inbox or whatever I'm
> writing to the the front without closing the new mailbox.

This is one of the things I really like about Mulberry. It has a lot of
idiosyncrasies, most from it being a cross-platform product, but it is
really customizable in its interface. It can do separate windows or it
can do a single pane with different sections.

For example, I currently run as a single window with mail messages taking
the top half of the window. The bottom half is split vertically, on the
left is my list of mailboxes. To the right of that is a very small preview
pane (just enough to let me know what the message is about). Mulberry
doesn't support HTML messages so I'm not worried about setting off any web
bugs or worse in the preview pane.

The mailbox display in the top of the window is tabbed, so once I open a
mailbox I can jump to again very quickly without browsing through a list of
100 mailboxes (I have it open 4 or 5 mailboxes in tabs automatically at
open).

I read messages in a separate window, using spacebar to move through the
message (and on to the next message which opens in the same window.)

Every couple months I try a new configuration, I can split the window in
half vertically instead of horizontally, make the preview pane huge and the
message display small, or break them all up into separate windows.

Kevin

On Jun 17, 2004, at 1:08 PM, Paul Schinder wrote:

> If you're comfortable installing Unix software, you can install an
> IMAP server on the machine you keep your mail on and use Mail as an
> IMAP client. All the mail then resides on one machine but can be read
> and manipulated from any other. My G5 runs courier-imap
> <http://www.courier-mta.org> and serves my mail to clients on my Palm
> and other Macs.

This is just a followup on my switch from Eudora. I'm still fairly
happy--although I have yet to figure out how to filter outgoing mail.
(This seems like too tremendous an oversight for even a "consumer" mail
application.) Paul's suggestion intrigued me. I figured even if I went
back to Eudora, I could stop worrying about losing mail during multiple
transistions. So I began poking around with it.

Courier-MTA seemed like too much mucking around with the command line.
So, I looked further. Surgemail
<http://www.netwinsite.com/surgemail/top_home.htm> really caught my
eye, particularly the five free licenses for "home/hobby" use. How cool
is that? Although I thought the package was more than I needed, I
installed it anyway. I found the documentation to be a bit over my
head. The manual just didn't explain the basics enough for me. After a
day of struggling with Surgemail, I decided to uninstall it and move
on. Well, the uninstaller deleted every file in my home directory!
Fortunately, I was on my webserver and not my primary machine.
Consequently, the directory was not terribly large. Retrospect had me
back in action in less than a half hour.

I furthered my exploration and rediscovered Postfix Enabler
<http://www.cutedgesystems.com/weblog/Tutorials/PostfixEnabler.html>
which had added UW-IMAP (and POP) support since the last time I used it
to send mail my Powerbook while I was on the road. Since I discovered
that Postfix Enabler only works with unadulterated config files, I
freshened the system. (About this point I began to wonder why I was
doing this, since the project was supposed to be fun--and a way of
distracting myself from work for a bit.) So, with a short delay, I
could send mail via IMAP with the click of a couple of buttons.

Next, I set up fetchmail, per the instructions found Tim McLaughlin's
web site <http://www.macwebb.com/emailFreedom/>. Since I was able to
get Apache running, this amount of config file creation seems within my
limits, thanks to BBEdit Lite (from the freeware days). Although
fetchamail downloads every message every time I run it instead of just
what's new despite the setting described by McLaughlin, I've moved on
to setting up procmail to dump the mail from each of my accounts into
its own mailbox. Then I'll handle the filtering to my various mailboxes
via Mail.app.

I'm sending this out because I thought there might be other
novice/hobbyists interested in this stuff. Also, any suggestions for
others for better ways to set things up--or words of warning about
vulnerabilities I may open myself up to--would be welcome.

Evans

Evans Brasfield
www.evansbrasfield.com
www.101sportbikeprojects.com

On Jul 5, 2004, at 2:02 AM, Evans Brasfield wrote:

> This is just a followup on my switch from Eudora. I'm still fairly
> happy--although I have yet to figure out how to filter outgoing mail.
> (This seems like too tremendous an oversight for even a "consumer"
> mail
> application.)

Mail offers no way to filter outgoing mail. Rules run only on incoming
mail--you can apply them manually to any selected message, but doing so
applies ALL rules. You can't apply an arbitrary rule to an arbitrary
message. (I discuss all this at some length in my forthcoming Take
Control of Email with Apple Mail ebook...)

You could, of course, write an AppleScript that performs whatever
actions you needed to apply to outgoing messages, then sends them--and
use the script, rather than the Send button, to send the messages. But
that's awkward, to say the least.

Joe

==

Joe Kissell
Curator of Interesting Things
Interesting Thing of the Day <http://itotd.com/>

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004 11:50:56 -0700, Joe Kissell <jkalt.cc> wrote:
> On Jul 5, 2004, at 2:02 AM, Evans Brasfield wrote:
> You could, of course, write an AppleScript that performs whatever
> actions you needed to apply to outgoing messages, then sends them--and
> use the script, rather than the Send button, to send the messages. But
> that's awkward, to say the least.

Not TOO awkward if you reassign the command key you use to send mail
to execute your script instead.

--
gkreme at gmail or kreme at kreme or syth at mac