Whither Eudora?

Hi John,

So basically is what you're saying is that if one uses Eudora,
presently there's no way to sync the information to another computer?
I'm in a real quandry right now as to whether to switch over to Apple
Mail and .Mac since I have a main computer iMac in my home in the
country and am using a Powerbook in a small office in the city, but
other than using the net provider's website to access my incoming
mail, there's no way to get to previously downloaded email, i.e. to
keep both machines in sync. Have you heard any rumors of whether
Eudora is planning on doing anything about this?

Thanks a bunch,
Sharon in Peru

On 5/12/06 13:44, "Sharon Stevenson" <ssteveterra.com.pe> wrote:

> So basically is what you're saying is that if one uses Eudora,
> presently there's no way to sync the information to another computer?

Not with Sync Services. The best you can do is run that "Import from Address
Book" script every so often. But that means that getting things from Eudora
to Address Book is going to be work on your part, and it's not going to just
happen.

> I'm in a real quandry right now as to whether to switch over to Apple
> Mail and .Mac since I have a main computer iMac in my home in the
> country and am using a Powerbook in a small office in the city, but
> other than using the net provider's website to access my incoming
> mail, there's no way to get to previously downloaded email, i.e. to
> keep both machines in sync. Have you heard any rumors of whether
> Eudora is planning on doing anything about this?

Nope. But I've never been a Eudora fan other than the minimal amount of
knowledge needed to support it. I refuse to use it personally or
professionally, so perhaps someone else will know if Eudora is planning on a
version 7 for Mac OS X, or if they're going to leave the Mac version at 6.x

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 13 May 2006, at 18:27 , Sharon Stevenson wrote:
> So basically is what you're saying is that if one uses Eudora,
> presently there's no way to sync the information to another computer?
> I'm in a real quandry right now as to whether to switch over to Apple
> Mail and .Mac since I have a main computer iMac in my home in the
> country and am using a Powerbook in a small office in the city, but
> other than using the net provider's website to access my incoming
> mail, there's no way to get to previously downloaded email, i.e. to
> keep both machines in sync. Have you heard any rumors of whether
> Eudora is planning on doing anything about this?

With multiple machines you want to use IMAP instead of POP3 for your
email.

This will likely necessitate a change from Eudora though since Eudora
has had very poor and flakey IMAP support.

If your ISP doesn't offer IMAP, get another ISP. Or at least get
another mail host.



--
Advance and attack! Attack and destroy! Destroy and rejoice!

On 13 May 2006, at 18:27 , John C. Welch wrote:
> I refuse to use it personally or
> professionally, so perhaps someone else will know if Eudora is
> planning on a
> version 7 for Mac OS X, or if they're going to leave the Mac
> version at 6.x

The OS X version of Eudora 7 is, according to at least one blog, in
serious trouble. A beta was supposed to be available in the fall of
2005, but nothing so far. The Windows version of 7 is already.

More than one person has reported that The "Universal Binaries" have
further delayed them, which, if true, tells me 1) they are not using
xcode 2) their cocoa programmers don't know what they are doing 3)
they are screwing around with either undocumented stuff or are trying
way too hard to 'port' the Windows version. None of this bodes well.

--
I get the feeling that some people's idea of heaven is an "I told you
so" T-shirt - mmalc

On 5/14/06 08:17, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> wrote:

> More than one person has reported that The "Universal Binaries" have
> further delayed them, which, if true, tells me 1) they are not using
> xcode 2) their cocoa programmers don't know what they are doing 3)
> they are screwing around with either undocumented stuff or are trying
> way too hard to 'port' the Windows version. None of this bodes well.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were using Codewarrior up until last year.
Prior to Intel, there wasn't an immediate need to switch. If they were,
switching compilers and workflow is not something you just do.

I'd also not be surprised if they kept the application as a Carbon
application. Rewriting in Cocoa is not the magic "Make it perfect" spell
that the Cocoa Myth implies that it is.

Option 3 wouldn't surprise me at all, even though I can't imagine, outside
of a rather vertical market, they're making any money on the Windows
version. In fact, I was real unimpressed when I realized the Windows version
of 6's MAPI integration made it susceptible to Outlook Virii.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

At 5:27 PM -0700 2006/05/13, John C. Welch wrote:
>On 5/12/06 13:44, "Sharon Stevenson" <ssteveterra.com.pe> wrote:
>
>> So basically is what you're saying is that if one uses Eudora,
>> presently there's no way to sync the information to another computer?
>
>Not with Sync Services. The best you can do is run that "Import from Address
>Book" script every so often. But that means that getting things from Eudora
>to Address Book is going to be work on your part, and it's not going to just
>happen.

        No. Eudora 6.2.3 (current release) can read from the OS X
Address Book just fine. It can't *write*, so I make changes in
Address Book.app, but they show up immediately (after I close the
card) in Eudora's Address Book, which shows a read-only "OS X Address
Book" containing the contents of the system AB.

        Note that Eudora seems to have an issue with home vs. work
addresses. Perhaps 4 times when I've sent messages to work contacts
after 5pm, Eudora got the Home email address entry, which wasn't want
I wanted. Eudora should always use/get the first email address, and
there appears to be a strange "feature" in AB that sometimes provides
the wrong one.


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

I have been a Eudora user for over a decade. It is fast and I prefer
to have a plain-text Emailer. There is room for improvement, but I
can live with 6.2.3. It is much better than Entourage which I find
incredibly annoying (I use it for newsgroups).

I did try Mailsmith which has some good features, but it was
unbelievably sl-o-o-w. Has anyone tried it in the last couple of
years and has it improved its speed in that time?

I do hope that Eudora for the Mac survives.

On May 14, 2006, at 5:46 PM, Chris Pepper wrote:

> Eudora should always use/get the first email address, and
> there appears to be a strange "feature" in AB that sometimes provides
> the wrong one.

I've seen Apple's Mail.app do the same thing (during Tiger, but not
"recently"). Now that I know Eudora also does it, Address Book seems
the most likely culprit. At least with Eudora, I can (and do) set
Eudora to show the real address, so it's easy to catch the problem.

   --John

Good morning,

On 15/5/06 at 8:15 AM -0700, MList <moon.mlistdsl.pipex.com> wrote:

>I did try Mailsmith which has some good features, but it was
>unbelievably sl-o-o-w. Has anyone tried it in the last couple of
>years and has it improved its speed in that time?

The speed of Mailsmith has been improving. If you haven't tried it in a couple
of years then you should definitely give it another try. I'm more than satisfied
with the speed of the current version.


Charlie

--
   Charlie Garrison <garrisonzeta.org.au>
   PO Box 141, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

On 5/15/06 at 8:15 AM, moon.mlistdsl.pipex.com (MList) wrote:

>I did try Mailsmith which has some good features, but it was
>unbelievably sl-o-o-w. Has anyone tried it in the last couple of
>years and has it improved its speed in that time?

Speed has steadily improved with each new version. But speed like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I find Mailsmith's speed to be adequate for my needs. For reference, I am running Mailsmith on a 1.6GHz AlBook with 1.5GB RAM.

At 13:17 -0700 UTC, on 2006-05-15, Charlie Garrison wrote:

> On 15/5/06 at 8:15 AM -0700, MList <moon.mlistdsl.pipex.com> wrote:
>
>>I did try Mailsmith which has some good features, but it was
>>unbelievably sl-o-o-w. [...]
>
> [...] I'm more than satisfied with the speed of the current version.

What "speed" are we talking about? Network speed? UI responsiveness? Spam
incineration? Filtering and search speed? Eudora is blazing fast at searches
through tons of mail. I'm curious if Mailsmith can compete with that.


--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

>> So basically is what you're saying is that if one uses Eudora,
>> presently there's no way to sync the information to another computer?
>
> With multiple machines you want to use IMAP instead of POP3 for your
> email.

There's always the possibility to use a software which synchronizes your
different Macs.

I'm e.g. using Synchronize! to syynchronize my two working Macs. As I only
use one of them at any given time, there's no problem running Synchronize!
when I connect my PowerBook to the home network. Synchronize! syncs my data
folder, the Outlook Express folder, and some other folders which might be
changed. (And I make another run of Synchronize! before disconnecting the
PowerBook from the home network...)

This takes only about two or three minutes and my Macs are in sync again.

So no need to whither any software or buy other software only to have your
E-Mail consistent on two (or more) different Macs.

Udo

On 15/5/06 at 8:15 AM -0700, MList <moon.mlistdsl.pipex.com> wrote:

I did try Mailsmith which has some good features, but it was unbelievably sl-o-o-w. Has anyone tried it in the last couple of years and has it improved its speed in that time?

IMO the biggest cause of slowness in MailSmith is having too many messages in an Incoming (or Outgoing) Mailbox. Once these are archived to another maibox and the original mailboxes rebuilt, you see an immediate improvement in responsiveness.

I'm surprised that Chairlie Garrison didn't mention this along with his archiving setup.

HTH

John Wolff Hamilton, New Zealand

At 05:27 PM 5/13/2006, Sharon Stevenson wrote:

but
other than using the net provider's website to access my incoming
mail, there's no way to get to previously downloaded email, i.e. to
keep both machines in sync.

With the POP servers I've used for years, the Leave Mail On Server option in Eudora works fine. Each machine downloads the mail once. The amount of time I leave mail on the server is mainly a function of mailbox size. I usually set it for seven days unless I know that one or more systems won't be able to check mail in that time frame.

You can set Eudora to delete mail from the server when it is trashed on the computer. This is a helpful in keeping junk off the other computer.

I know there are POP servers that don't allow mail to be left up, but I believe that's the exception. MS Exchange is one.




Allen Carter
Network Engineer - Intrinsyx Technologies
NASA Ames Research Center

Good evening,

On 17/5/06 at 10:14 AM -0700, dtopcomp <johngmg.net.nz> wrote:

>IMO the biggest cause of slowness in MailSmith is having too many
>messages in an Incoming (or Outgoing) Mailbox. Once these are archived
>to another maibox and the original mailboxes rebuilt, you see an
>immediate improvement in responsiveness.
>
>I'm surprised that Chairlie Garrison didn't mention this along with his
>archiving setup.

Didn't even occur to me since my archiving process is automatic. Once each day,
my 'active' mailboxes have older messages archived to date-stamped mailboxes. It
has become such a natural way of storing messages, I forget it's even happening.

For anyone who is curious, John is probably referring to the utility I wrote for
Mailsmith to archive messages. I've considered extending it to support Eudora
and Apple Mail, so I guess this would be a good opportunity to get interest from
Eudora users. I've already received quite a bit interested from Apple Mail
users.

<http://www.garrison.com.au/freeware/emailarchiver.html>

--
   Charlie Garrison <garrisonzeta.org.au>
 

John Wolff wrote:

> 15. Re: Whither Eudora?

...
> IMO the biggest cause of slowness in MailSmith is having too many messages in an
> Incoming (or Outgoing) Mailbox. Once these are archived to another maibox and
> the original mailboxes rebuilt, you see an immediate improvement in responsiveness.
...

I actually suspect that's my biggest problem using Eudora (which I still miss, sigh.).

I would cause a huge inbox because I don't like throwing things away, and the thing never reminded/motivated me to go archive the Inbox/Outbox/anyotherbox before it got too-massive. I'm not a programmer, I'm instead just an annoying, lazy user who frequently asks for features, but wouldn't this kind of feature be a good idea for ANY email program? Currently, Thunderbird asks me "compact mailboxes?" every once in a while. I wouldn't mind if it asked a similar questions about making an archive of anything that's getting huge, and it doesn't seem like it would be too hard. Of course,

NO computer programming task seems too large when I'm thinking it up for other people. :)

JMR

At 5:43 PM -0700 5/14/06, Google Kreme wrote:
>The OS X version of Eudora 7 is, according to at least one blog, in
>serious trouble. A beta was supposed to be available in the fall of
>2005, but nothing so far. The Windows version of 7 is already.
>
>More than one person has reported that The "Universal Binaries" have
>further delayed them, which, if true, tells me 1) they are not using
>xcode 2) their cocoa programmers don't know what they are doing 3)
>they are screwing around with either undocumented stuff or are trying
>way too hard to 'port' the Windows version. None of this bodes well.

My understanding is that Eudora 7 is a complete rewrite, which simply
takes a long time, particularly if all the needed resources aren't
available for whatever reason. There's no porting of the Windows
version, and the programmers absolutely do know what they're doing.

cheers... -Adam

--
New Take Control ebooks! ........... http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/
_____________________________________________________________________
Adam C. Engst: I publish TidBITS, write books, and make sure the
acetidbits.com right people know each other in the Mac industry.
Me: http://www.tidbits.com/adam/ TidBITS: http://www.tidbits.com/

At 10:18 -0700 05/18/2006, James M. Ray wrought:

>I would cause a huge inbox because I don't like throwing things away,
>and the thing never reminded/motivated me to go archive the
>Inbox/Outbox/anyotherbox before it got too-massive
______________________________________________________________________

Greetings,

That's what filters are for.

I keep my in-box open for friends, family, and urgent correspondence.

I filter all email list mail and subscriptions to their respectively
named mailboxes, and I have Eudora set to open mailboxes that get new
mail. Thus when I have no more open mailboxes I know I've deal with all
new mail or deliberately chosen not to.

I also have manual filters that let me quickly filter the mail I'm
reading (or looking at in a mailbox) to an archive mailbox if I think
it's worth keeping. Some archive mailboxes are specific to a particular
list, and some are generic.

Some few email lists I use a filter to copy new mail (on arrival) to an
archive mailbox so as to make sure to keep every message.

Personally I wouldn't like it if some deus ex machina moved email out of
my active mailboxes.

After having tried out every email client available for the Mac I still
prefer Eudora, and I hope to God Eudora 7 gets completed and is still the
client I know and love (but festooned with useful features made available
by Mac OS X technologies).


Chris

At 11:58 05/18/06 -0700, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>There's no porting of the Windows version

Hopefully not only no porting of the code but no copying the UI. I find
Windows Eudora to be a mess compared with Mac Eudora, and not just because
it's running under Windows.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

At 10:18 05/18/06 -0700, James M. Ray wrote:
>I would cause a huge inbox because I don't like throwing things away, and
>the thing never reminded/motivated me to go archive the
>Inbox/Outbox/anyotherbox before it got too-massive.

My approach is sort of an end run around the issue. I too don't like
throwing things away -- I still have all my non-bulk email from the
beginning, almost 15 years ago.

What I do is set it up so that all incoming and outgoing email is
automatically COPIED to an archive mailbox. (Lists and other bulk stuff
that get filtered to their own mailboxes don't participate in this scheme,
though email I send TO lists does participate.)

Periodically I move all the messages from this default archive mailbox to a
mailbox I create specifically for that period of time -- used to be
monthly, but the machines are fast enough that I've gone to quarterly. For
many people, annually would be fine. I have to create lots of reminders to
myself to do things, so this is just one more reminder.

Since I know that everything is archived, I feel free to delete email from
my inboxes (I basically use two, one personal and one professional) when I
see no immediate reason to keep it at high visibility. As a result, my
inbox grows only slowly, though it still grows because some things get
buried before I'm ready to cull them. (Same problem I have with my desk.) I
have to clean it out three or four times a year, but it never reaches
crisis levels.

BUT -- this still takes a good bit of work to set up, and working with
filters in this way is a lot like programming. Certainly people not trained
as programmers can and do set up schemes like this and even far more
complicated, but for anyone who doesn't like thinking like a programmer,
it'll be a royal pain.

So what I'm getting to is that the capabilities are already there, in
Eudora and many other email clients, but are not in the form of a
recommended policy and aren't exactly easy to set up. What I'd like to see
is an option that says "activate email archiving based on Eudora-defined
policy" (or whatever client). That option would set up a scheme like what I
described above with no further user input. (It might even use filters for
much of the implementation, but they would be hidden where I couldn't muck
them up while trying to do something else with filters.)

Hey Adam, how big is your email archive now? I think when mine was about
30,000, yours was about ten times that big. I've temporarily lost track of
the exact size of mine, but I'd guess that the disparity has only grown.

Edward
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org