Eudora goes open source

On Oct 17, 2006, at 11:20 AM, Andrew Laurence wrote:

> I detest preview panes as a rule and disable them whenever I'm on a
> client that uses them. Not to mention that the little preview
> sniplet is exactly how Outlook gets viruses without even opening a
> message...

For me it's the opposite. I read all of my mail in the preview pane.
Turning off graphics can eliminate those problems.

On Oct 17, 2006, at 8:20 AM, Andrew Laurence wrote:

> Not to mention that the little preview
> sniplet is exactly how Outlook gets viruses without even opening a
> message...

The message IS "open" (at least in the computer file sense) when part
of it is shown in the preview pane.

The extreme case, I think, was the conspiracy between (a very old)
Exchange (version) and (a very old) Outlook (version), in which a
crafted over-length Date: header would cause infection simply by
being displayed in an Outlook message list. No need even for a
preview pane to be present.

As tenacious as old versions are, I doubt that combination of
versions exists many places any more. The attack surfaced around
1996. (I think we still have our over-length Date: filter in place--
tenacity again.)

Ah, yes--Eudora and open source. Whether the open source plan works
out well or not, it's better than the alternative, which was
cancellation. One small part of the plan which I haven't seen
mentioned here is that Qualcomm plans at some point to stop pushing
ads to the Sponsored form of Eudora.

My use of Eudora these days? Sending stationery-based messages, and
reading mail from the days I used it for more--which I'll be tossing
soon.

   --John

Robert (and others, like me, with strong views on Eudora),

At 08:22 on 17-10-2006, robert958 wrote:
> Here are a few initial thoughts or hopes that I'd appreciate being
> dropping in the Penelope Idea Hopper.

The Penelope web page lists the contact addresses for the Penelope
developers and asks for feedback. It would probably be worth sending
your ideas directly to one of them. Especially as you have some good
ideas!

<http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope#Team_Members>

_________________
=> Jolin Warren, Edinburgh, Scotland

I was also very concerned by the move to mozilla. I'm all in favor of open source, frankly I'm a Paid user. The expressed rationale, better HTML support, is what concerns me. I don't need HTML 99% of the time, and "send to browser" solves that last 1%. HTML is not a problem in Eudora. It doesn't work perfectly, but it's not a problem.

The problems in Eudora are in other areas:

1) Dealing with mail servers run by folks who think that Outlook is a good mail client, or who don't think much. Eudora needs to work the majic to insulate me from Microsoft.

2) S/MIME for those management folks who think their ideas need protecting. Even on WinXP, with integrated OS support for this stuff, Eudora doesn't understand it. Alas, neither does Thunderbird.

3) Header management because some folks seem to run Lotus Notes, or some other engine that adds whacky "X-Notes-Item" headers up the wazoo. There needs to be a way to add to the "BLAH BLAH BLAH" button's list of stuff to suppress. Alas, Thunderbird has no such button.

Let me close by listing another thing that IS NOT A PROBLEM. Eudora filters have been the key to my eMail management for a decade. The pale substitute in Mail.app or Thunderbird are not better.

At 8:22 -0700 17/10/06, robert958 wrote:
>I was shocked to hear that Qualcomm would be dropping Eudora.

You were? I've been waiting for this penny to
drop for years. Email was never a fit for
Qualcomm, and I never did figger out why they
thought so (just a sign of my ignorance, I'm
sure).

That said, Eudora better survive, as it is, as
someone else here said, email itself.

Can we have one tiny thing please: a way to
archive email from Eudora. I hate Outlook (use it
at work) but its archive feature is enormously
useful.


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Hinckley, Gingins, Switzerland
home: dbhsuiattle.org
work: dahhq.iucn.org; http://iucn.org/
the Suiattle: 48º 19' N, 121º 32' W
Gingins: 46° 24.685 N, 6° 10.556 E

On 17 Oct 2006, at 09:22 , robert958 wrote:
> I was shocked to hear that Qualcomm would be dropping Eudora.

Um... that's not exactly the case. Rather, they are releasing it
back into the wild. Remember, Eudora started as a free program. Now
it will be free AND open source.

> Since I learned that the real Steve Dorner is associated with the
> Penelope project, my hopes for the future have risen.

There's a unreal Steve Dorner? Never mind, there probably is.

> Eudora was the 2nd email program I used after something called Elm
> or Pine. And it has been the centre of my mailing life since the
> early 90s.

Pine Is Not Elm. :)

> The little I've seen of Thunderbird, with its screen hogging multi-
> pane windows, makes it unattractive. I prefer Eudora.

This is the big question on everyone's mind. Are we going to see a
TBird like Eudora or a Eudora like Tbird?

> Often, when writing a email, the email form is tiny on my 2
> monitors which are covered with my real work. Penelope developers
> should know that email supports the other work and my computer is
> not there to do email. Not to make this point a rant... but it
> seems that most app developers think I bought my computer to run
> only their program. Emailing is an important part of my day, but
> emailing serves my real work and therefore can have only a portion
> of my attention, screen space and CPU cycles.

This is why I love VirtueDesktops. I can have mail app maximized to
1680x1050 on a desktop all its own.

> Put anything in front of the mydomain.com and it will come to me.
> It means that if anyone, like Adobe, were to sell my name, I'd know
> it by the spam I receive.

Well, putting aside what a poor idea that is, there is one part of
this that is important, and it is a failing in TBird now and in most
every email program. If you use so-called 'plus' addressing

(robert+adobemydomain.tld<1> in your example) then the email program
should make it easy to use that + address, and it should understand
delimited addresses, so that I don't have to individually setup each
and every variant manually.

> Well, I do get a ton of spam.

Of course you do. Anyone who wildcards (<anything>domain.tld) their
email will. I suggest you make sure that plus addressing is enabled
on your mail server and use that instead.

> This function would be very useful if it was part of Penelope

The trouble is, for the majority of people, spam fighting is done at
the server, if at all. I'd much rather have server side filters
(procmail) and server side spam tagging (Spamassassin) than have to
do ANYTHING myself.

Sure, once every couple of months I look at the messages SA has
flagged, but otherwise, they tend to rot until I purge the spam box.


> Since Eudora knows what mail I've actually sent it should be able
> to identify the real bounce-backs (very few) from the spammers (many).

This is not a bad idea, though, again, I think it would work much
better on the server (MTA level) than on the client (MUA).

> Eudora has lots of files stashed all over my Macintosh (I hate this
> about modern apps)

Er? the vast majority of apps nowadays have a single application
bundle, a single pref file, and perhaps a folder in ~/Library/
Application Support/

> I'd like to see the default email be plain text, and not have the
> formatting buttons too inviting.

That is a personal preference, and on place where TBird pwns<2>
Eudora. It allows a high level of detail on the format of messages,
including lists of users who can and cannot receive html-ized email.
I simply set everything to text only and the rest be damned :)

<1> Don't use mydomain.com as an 'example'; that's a real domain,
with a lot of users. mydomain.tld (top-level-domain) or example.com
is fine.

<2> Sorry, too much<3> World of Warcraft recently

<3> Hah! As if that is even POSSIBLE. Never enough.

--
"I know she's in there," said Verence, holding his crown in his hands
in the famous Ai-Señor-Mexican-Bandits-Have-Raided-Our-Village position

At 8:22 AM -0700 10/17/06, robert958 wrote:
>I was shocked to hear that Qualcomm would be dropping Eudora.

After the long delays in version 7, and the denial of IMAP flaws in 6
that were then miraculously discovered, the apparent lack of
development, and the lack of support in general, I was not surprised.
Disappointed - yes; surprised - no.

I'd feared the worst, that Eudora would go the way of so many
venerable titles when their corporate owners shut them down, or their
one-man-band operators got a full-time paying gig.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Qualcomm did the right thing
(my definition) in opening Eudora and allowing it to remain available
to the dedicated user community.

I regularly work in the three-pane email client in Outlook,
Entourage, and Mail - but not Thunderbird. As others have pointed out
(and some others have decried), Eudora's UI has some unique features
that allow a style of use that the three-pane applications do not.
Specifically, after checking mail I can view and sort the opened
mailboxes in order of importance, and close or leave open any that I
choose. This is a way of working that is simply not possible in
three-pane mail programs. I have not (yet) looked at Thunderbird, but
given its relation to Firefox I cannot visualize how a single window
program can support the multiple open windows that makes Eudora
unique and useful. (I actually liked the limitation of Eudora wrt
html mail, and liked the idea of having to open html mail in a
browser with File > Open In Browser.)

That being said, perhaps Thudora will once again have the ability to
natively use PGP/GPG...

There is much discussion about the change and changes in comp.mail.eudora.mac.
Further, I see that Andrew Starr has created a new newsgroup for the
Penelope project at:
<news://emailman.newsgrouphosting.com/emailman.software.clients.eudora.penelope>

I really think that Thunderbird and Eudora are a match made in heaven.

Eudora remains popular because it is (seemingly infinitely)
expandable to the needs of users. It handles small amounts of email
and large amounts of email with equal facility, and permits very fine-
grained tweaking to make it work exactly the way its users want/
expect it to work.

Thunderbird is built on very similar principles. While out of the box
it seems to be a ho-hum email client, with a bit of tweaking and some
power-user tips, it becomes quite powerful indeed. There are plug ins
(extensions, in Thunderbird parlance) which add basically the same
"Personality" setups you get in Eudora (plus the ability to use smart
rules to determine personalities on outgoing mail and replies), there
are others which enable you to integrate with various web services,
and even add custom buttons within the application.

This is just the sort of expandability that earned Eudora the
rightful spot as the most powerful email client, but unlike
Thunderbird, Eudora has been sort of left behind, and now lags behind
other email clients in basic functionality as well as expandability.

What I'm really most curious about is what, precisely, Eudora will
lend to Thunderbird that it doesn't already have in existing extensions.

--Nik

Sigman has it exactly. I believe Eudora is the only client offering the multi-window mode and that is central to my workflow too.. In fact it's the only thing I care about in an email client (I can live with most other issues) and I would be devastated to lose it.

On 10/16/06 2:01 AM, "Gregory Sigman" <sigmanohio.edu> wrote:

> My wife's best friend uses
> Win Eudora and keeps six different mailbox 'panes' open and tiled
> (she has a wide display) at all times. If Thunderbird or Entourage or
> Outlook or any other client can do that, I haven't seen it.

I've been an Entourage user for years, but started as a Eudora user back in
the early 90's before switching to Claris Emailer...which led me eventually
to Entourage. But I use Entourage with multiple windows and understand the
desire to do that. I have normally five or six windows open at once. One is
a Custom View called simply "Unread", which displays all unread mail
(excepting certain mail folders I don't care to read, like Junk Mail);
another is the generic 3-paned mail browser usually displaying my Inbox. But
I have an AppleScript keyed to Cmd-Ctrl-F that will switch that window to
any folder I care to view, just by typing a few letters of its name. Then
there is a calendar window, and sometimes a Tasks window (but usually the
list in Calendar is enough).

Any time I want to have two, three or more folders open at once, I can do
that just by typing Cmd-Option-1, which opens a new Mail browser window, and
then Cmd-Ctrl-F to select the folder. (Or click on the folder in the folder
pane.)

I'm talking about Entourage here only because I think the key issue people
are concerned about, really, isn't opening mailboxes in separate windows,
but the functionality that provides. There are alternative ways to have the
same functionality, as I've found in Entourage.

I'll be quite interested in trying the new Thunderbird/Eudora when it
emerges; I think it holds considerable promise.
--

Allen Watson . Writer/Webmaster [ p. 503 .281 .0250 m. 503 .916 .9411
e. watson.allencomcast.net
homepage.mac.com/allen_a_watson/

At 8:22 AM -0700 10/17/06, robert958 wrote:
>I have my own domain. Last week I registered with Adobe for a course in
>Flash video. When I registered, I filled in my email address as
>adobe_Robertmydomain.com. I just made up that address on the spot. That's
>because I have an email address that is
>anything-in-front-of-the-mydomain.com.

        I do the same thing, but I just got hit for the first time with a
problem - namely someone (or some infected machine somewhere) decided to
start using my domain as the return address for a whole bunch of spam (much
of it Windows virus laden). I've been getting the complaints and bounces
ever since.

        That did prompt me to set up DNS TXT records with SPF (the Sender
Policy
Framework) information for the domains I control. For those people who's
mail servers pay attention to SPF info, email forged from my domains can be
safely rejected. See <http://www.openspf.org/> for more details. SPF
certainly isn't the panacea for spam, but it does seem to be of some value
for making forgery a bit more of a challenge for the "bad guys".



--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://xri.net/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

On Oct 19, 2006, at 1:46 PM, Mick's Macs wrote:

> I too am very concerned about the future of Eudora as it has been
> my primary email program since version 1.x or so. Well over a
> decade of filters and customizations and such would be i tragic to
> lose. I think it has truly become the program of choice for
> advanced and power users like ourselves. Having said that, I also
> use Apple's Mail program and stay up to date on it. It's what I end
> up recommneding to the vast majority of my Mac Clients. At least we
> know that it's going to be there in 5 years. Sadly, the same cannot
> be said of Eudora. :-(

I stopped using Eudora when I started using OS X. I was never happy
with Eudora's OS X support, plus I found its IMAP implementation
horribly slow. I'll definitely take a look at the new Thunderbird-
based version and I may even start using it again.

At 10:46 -0700 UTC, on 2006-10-19, RSaunders wrote:

> Content-Type: text/html

[...]

> I don't need HTML 99% of the time

I couldn't agree more. So why send this as HTML?

(I'm getting tired of all the useless HTML crap on this list. It's getting
close to 50% by now. I'm close to reaching the point of deleting such mail
unread. I don't recall a single case where it added value. It just makes
things more difficult to read, which to me suggests the posters don't care
about being read. Which in turn raises the question: why post in the first
place?)


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

On Oct 19, 2006, at 10:46 AM, Mick's Macs wrote:

> I too am very concerned about the future of Eudora as it has been
> my primary email program since version 1.x or so.

So keep using it in the just-released version or the one before.
Nothing is going to reach out and disable your Eudora installation.
(You might want to "warehouse" a copy of the installation file
against the time when Qualcomm makes it unavailable on the eudora.com
servers (if ever).)

It seems highly unlikely that it will stop working under Leopard.
There's a bigger chance that it would stop working (or working
completely) under whatever large cat follows Leopard, or the second
big cat after Leopard. (Rosetta will likely go away *sometime*--but
even then your old machine and OS will keep running.) Similar
argument on the Windows side: if Eudora 7.1 works under released
Vista (unknowable until there is a released Vista) it will keep
working for a long time.

So the next question is "Which will stop working first--
    (a) email as we know it (knew it before HTML) or
    (b) your last unretired machine/OS version combination with will
run Qualcomm Eudora?"

There's a decent chance the answer is (a), either when email stops
happening or when POP and IMAP are both replaced or when Mac OS-like,
Windows-like, Unix-like desktop machines go away. (I see zero chance
that Qualcomm Eudora the now "old" way would have been adjusted to
POP and IMAP going away or desktops/laptops going away.)

That said, it seems to be important to the scores-of-open-mailbox-and-
message-windows folks to convince the Penelope crew that there are
more than 10 of you. (I never used Eudora that way, and I don't
think I'm very lonely in that.)

   --John

On Oct 19, 2006, at 11:51 AM, Ron Burns wrote:

> I believe Eudora is the only client offering the multi-window mode

PowerMail from CTM Development supports multiple windows (i.e. a
single mailbox's messages in a single window with nothing else), as
does Thunderbird. Both also permit you to hide the message preview
pane and work pretty well in such a configuration. (Unlike Mail.app,
which will let you do that, but you can't navigate to other messages
from within an open message window -- grr!)

Thunderbird requires a LITTLE jiggering to make it work just right,
but it can certainly be done.

--Nik

At 10:46 AM -0700 10/19/06, RSaunders wrote:
>3) Header management because some folks seem to run Lotus Notes, or some
>other engine that adds whacky "X-Notes-Item" headers up the wazoo. There
>needs to be a way to add to the "BLAH BLAH BLAH" button's list of stuff to
>suppress. Alas, Thunderbird has no such button.

        In Eudora, one of the preference panes I have is labeled "boring
headers" and I have just added the first few characters of all the headers
I wish to suppress - "X" is one of them. I don't know if this is a standard
preference pane, or if it came with one of the many plug ins I have been
migrating from Eudora instillation to instillation since the mid 1990s.



--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://xri.net/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

At 10:46 on 19-10-2006, RSaunders wrote:
> 3) Header management because some folks seem to run Lotus Notes, or
> some other engine that adds whacky "X-Notes-Item" headers up the
> wazoo. There needs to be a way to add to the "BLAH BLAH BLAH"
> button's list of stuff to suppress. Alas, Thunderbird has no such
> button.

This has been possible for a long time. If you enable Eudora's
'Esoteric Settings' plug-in, there is a preference pane called
'Boring Headers'. Enter the header that you want ignored on a new
line here. In your situation, all you need to do is enter in
'X-Notes' and it will hide anything beginning with that (including
'X-Notes-Item', 'X-Notes-Attachment', or whatever).

On 17 Oct 2006, at 09:22 , robert958 wrote:
> I'd like to see the default email be plain text, and not have the
> formatting buttons too inviting.

Go to the 'Styled Text' preference pane and un-tick the box labelled
'Show formatting toolbar'. By default, all new messages will now hide
the formatting toolbar. In fact, I'd forgotten Eudora had such a
thing as I haven't had mine enabled since I started using it years
ago. :-)

Cheers,
Jolin

_________________
=> Jolin Warren, Edinburgh, Scotland

On 20 Oct 2006, at 13:07 , Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> At 10:46 -0700 UTC, on 2006-10-19, RSaunders wrote:
> (I'm getting tired of all the useless HTML crap on this list. It's
> getting
> close to 50% by now. I'm close to reaching the point of deleting
> such mail
> unread. I don't recall a single case where it added value. It just
> makes
> things more difficult to read, which to me suggests the posters
> don't care
> about being read. Which in turn raises the question: why post in
> the first
> place?)

Well, to be fair, it's no necessarily their fault. Web Crossing is,
as I recall, responsible for a large quantity of the html mail that
hits this list.

Still, this is the only mailing list I am on, and I am on dozens,
that even accepts HTML mail.

--
Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.

On 10/23/06 04:34, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> wrote:

> Still, this is the only mailing list I am on, and I am on dozens,
> that even accepts HTML mail.

If you're still on most Apple email lists, that would be an incorrect
statement.

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

Dan Hinckley wrote:
> At 8:22 -0700 17/10/06, robert958 wrote:
>> I was shocked to hear that Qualcomm would be dropping Eudora.
>
> You were? I've been waiting for this penny to
> drop for years. Email was never a fit for
> Qualcomm, and I never did figger out why they
> thought so (just a sign of my ignorance, I'm
> sure).
>
They bought it and the Eudora Internet Mail Server (EIMS) way back when
cell phones were starting to offer email, Palm was selling units with a
private radio net for surfing and email, etc... I've always figured they
wanted email expertise in house but never crossed over and actually put
email into their products. And now it seems they only make chips for
phones and not phones and certainly not a Blackberry competitor. So it's
kind of been sitting on the balance sheet taking up space till they
finally decided to set it free. (I wonder what this does to their
financials and if the wait was to minimize the impact?)

They made a deal for EIMS a few years ago and the original developer has
it back. It seems to be as much a labor of love as anything else. I may
be wrong but I'm guessing me makes more with his movie work than with
EIMS. He was involved in all three LOTR plus others and even had a
credit on LOTR III.