Eudora/Penelope

On Aug 8, 2007, at 10:04 AM, Gregory Sigman wrote:

> Has anyone seen this:
> <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22235>
>
> ...and how does that make you feel vis-à-vis
> Penelope? Is there any real hope at all for the
> future of Eudora?

I don't think it affects Penelope at all because Penelope was already
a project outside the Mozilla organizational structure. Penelope is
being developed as an extension to Thunderbird so unless
Thunderbird's extension system had to itself be modified to implement
some desired Penelope feature, work on Penelope is not dependent upon
Thunderbird developers.

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope

Gregory Sigman wrote, On 8/8/07 10:04 AM:
> Has anyone seen this:
> <http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22235>

hadn't, but ty for pointing it out
>
> ...and how does that make you feel vis-à-vis
> Penelope? Is there any real hope at all for the
> future of Eudora?

I dunno. I remember so well the day when Eudora stopped collecting mail
after I moved my company's domain to a new VPS. As a matter of urgent
emergency, I evaluated Thunderbird and Mail and chose Thunderbird for
four key reasons (as a very very heavy email user):

-- superior organizational tools such as tagging of message (multiple
tags can be applied to one message), the new (as of T'bird 2) ability to
cycle between All, Unread, Favorite and recent folders, and so on.

-- T'birds filter options are more sophisticated (though I miss Eudora
on the times I need to manually apply a filter to outgoing mail ...
something Tbird does not do on its own)

-- something in me just hates the new change in email storage format in
Mail. I have hundreds of folders, with something like 50,000 messages.
Mail would store these as separate little files on my HD instead of as
standard mboxes ... and why? For *spotlight*? (I admit to hating
spotlight, which is quite the dog on my G4 dual, and to this day I miss
Sherlock and even the OS 7 Finder)

-- there is a reasonably nice collection of add-ons folks have done,
available on mozilla.com


So, I can report that now, after 5 months of use I am growing used to
Thunderbird. And, not only used to Thunderbird, but have now grown fond
of certain features that old lady Eudora, who -- for me -- is finally
fading into the past, did not have.


[For any Eudora switchers contemplating the switch to Thunderbird, a
must-have extension is "Show InOut" which puts recipient names on
outgoing mail, and sender names on incoming mail, in ONE column.
(Whereas Eudora italicizes recipient names in the "Who" column, Show
InOut has a separate column with icons indicating in/out, but it takes
up very little real estate.]


I have read the feature requests on the Penelope wiki and notice that
(1) most of the requests are already possible with Thunderbird, and (2)
nobody seems to have done a serious gap analysis between these two
programs (the comparisons that are posted on the wiki, IMO, do not
constitute a rigorous professional analysis), which leads me to feel a
bit shy of the Penelope project. If the gap analysis upon which
programming will be predicated is weak and inaccurate ...

... maybe it's time to stop looking for a Eudora Replacement, and to
adapt to using available tools to their best advantage.

kazar

At 7:04 AM -0700 8/8/07, Gregory Sigman wrote:
>Has anyone seen this:
><http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22235>
>
>...and how does that make you feel vis-à-vis
>Penelope? Is there any real hope at all for the
>future of Eudora?

When that first happened, I asked Steve Dorner
and he said that it was essentially unrelated,
since the Eudora/Penelope project is merely based
on Thunderbird code and has no connection to the
Mozilla or now Thunderbird organization.

cheers... -Adam

--
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS Publisher <http://www.tidbits.com/adam/>

>Has anyone seen this:
><http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=22235>
>
>...and how does that make you feel vis-à-vis
>Penelope? Is there any real hope at all for the
>future of Eudora?

Indeed, what is the point of hoping for Eudora's
future? I've been a loyal fan since 1989, and
still have archived email from those days... but
I think this is the end of the road. A sad day.
Dorner must feel like he's been shot in the
stomach.

For all the weaknesses of Mail, it's increasingly
integrated into the Mac "platform" and I simply
can no longer ignore it.


H.
--

Hudson Barton

On 10-Aug-2007, at 03:54, Datatude wrote:
> -- something in me just hates the new change in email storage
> format in
> Mail. I have hundreds of folders, with something like 50,000 messages.
> Mail would store these as separate little files on my HD instead of as
> standard mboxes ... and why? For *spotlight*? (I admit to hating
> spotlight, which is quite the dog on my G4 dual, and to this day I
> miss
> Sherlock and even the OS 7 Finder)

Mail.app has ALWAYS stored its mail in MH folders (sorta like
maildir, but different), and the main reason is NOT for spotlight, it
is for speed. It also makes backups easier.

My own mail on my IMAP server has been in mbox format for years, but
I am almost done migrating all of my accounts to Maildir instead.
It's faster, more robust, and better supported.

On Aug 10, 2007, at 11:39 AM, Google Kreme wrote:

> Mail.app has ALWAYS stored its mail in MH folders (sorta like
> maildir, but different), and the main reason is NOT for spotlight, it
> is for speed. It also makes backups easier.

Prior to 10.4, Apple Mail used mbox. Now it uses folders of .emlx
files, which are not the same as MH folders. Due to the timing and
the way Spotlight is designed, I think this change was made for
Spotlight. The effects on speed are debatable, but in my experience
the new design is much slower. Certainly, it now uses more disk space.

The effect on backups is ambiguous. With individual files you can
copy less data when doing an incremental backup. On the other hand,
if you had a mailbox with thousands of old messages that never
change, this would also work nicely with incremental backups, and the
backup program wouldn't have to waste time scanning thousands of
files to see whether they'd changed. Also, the old design used
table_of_contents and content_index files per-mailbox, which again
worked nicely with mailboxes of old messages. Now, the
table_of_contents is stored in a single Envelope Index for all
messages, so this is more data to backup. Instead of content_index
files, the indexing is now done using Spotlight. On the one hand,
you're no longer backing up the content index, but on the other you
can't restore a large mailbox from backup and instantly search it;
you have to wait for Spotlight to reindex everything.

--Michael

On Aug 10, 2007, at 11:39 AM, Google Kreme wrote:

> Mail.app has ALWAYS stored its mail in MH folders (sorta like
> maildir, but different), and the main reason is NOT for spotlight, it
> is for speed. It also makes backups easier.
>
> My own mail on my IMAP server has been in mbox format for years, but
> I am almost done migrating all of my accounts to Maildir instead.
> It's faster, more robust, and better supported.
>

I find that all of those small files make backups a lot slower for
me, as it has to scan a large directory. It also often results in
backup errors if any messages are moved or trashed during the backup.

On 11-Aug-2007, at 02:47, Michael Tsai wrote:

> On Aug 10, 2007, at 11:39 AM, Google Kreme wrote:
>
>> Mail.app has ALWAYS stored its mail in MH folders (sorta like
>> maildir, but different), and the main reason is NOT for spotlight, it
>> is for speed. It also makes backups easier.
>
> Prior to 10.4, Apple Mail used mbox.

No it didn't. Even as far back as 10.1 it used a BUNDLE called
"something.mbox" which was, in point of fact, a MH<1> directory of
mail where each message was a single file (or sometimes a couple of
files).

<1> OK, a modified MH directory structure, but most MH tools worked
with a little massaging.

On Aug 20, 2007, at 7:10 AM, Google Kreme wrote:

>> Prior to 10.4, Apple Mail used mbox.
>
> No it didn't. Even as far back as 10.1 it used a BUNDLE called
> "something.mbox" which was, in point of fact, a MH<1> directory of
> mail where each message was a single file (or sometimes a couple of
> files).

Yes, for IMAP it used bundles containing a MH-like structure, but for
POP and local mailboxes it used .mbox bundles, which stored mbox-like
files (no From-escaping). In 10.4, it switched to using .emlx files
(less like MH) for all messages.

--Michael