Problems with Eudora on OS X 10.5 (Leopard)?

Up to and including 10.3.9, Eudora always worked nearly flawlessly - heck it has been a very, very, very long time. Stable, no problems past a few annoyances.

As an aside, for Qualcomm to merely dump support is unconscionable. Unbelievable. Some of us have been loyal Eudora users for two decades, and loyal Qualcom customers since they took it over (16 years?) I sincerely hope that the Qualcom executives that made this decision roast in hell. We all can take some consolation that they too will be abandoned by the supplier of software that they rely heavily on as this seems to be the way of the corporate world. These execs will get their one day - soon, no doubt.

Have just upgraded from 10.3.9 to 10.5.4 on a PowerMac G5

From time to time Eudora gives various strange errors. Some can be recovered from by simply repeating the action, others require closing windows or exiting Eudora and opening it again.

Errors have included:

- "end of file reached" on a new mailbox that I tried to create and move messages to - "copy failed to an existing mailbox - "end of file reached on settings" - "can't send messages" - "there was an error saving the mail file" - etc.

Sometimes, the Eudora error says to "try closing windows or exiting and restarting Eudora". Usually, when I dismiss one error message, there is another one right behind it.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Eudora has some kind of memory allocation error and some kind of a problem with reading and writing to the MacOS X file system.

The Console log has a lot of Eudora errors in it, such as:

8/21/08 3:20:03 PM Eudora[2566] NSDocumentController Info.plist warning: The values of CFBundleTypeRole entries must be 'Editor', 'Viewer', 'None', or 'Shell'.

8/21/08 6:43:42 PM Eudora[2929] NSDocumentController Info.plist warning: The values of CFBundleTypeRole entries must be 'Editor', 'Viewer', 'None', or 'Shell'.

8/22/08 1:08:11 PM Eudora[3586] NSDocumentController Info.plist warning: The values of CFBundleTypeRole entries must be 'Editor', 'Viewer', 'None', or 'Shell'.

8/22/08 1:08:11 PM Eudora[3586] Error loading /Library/Printers/PPD Plugins/hpColorOptions.plugin/Contents/MacOS/hpColorOptions: dlopen(/Library/Printers/PPD Plugins/hpColorOptions.plugin/Contents/MacOS/hpColorOptions, 265): Library not loaded: /Library/Printers/hp/Frameworks/hpImaging.framework/Versions/B/hpImaging Referenced from: /Library/Printers/PPD Plugins/hpColorOptions.plugin/Contents/MacOS/hpColorOptions Reason: image not found

The last one tells me that there is a problem with old HP printer software that I need to delete.

Alas, I have not had the presence of mind to check the System Log or Console Log right after the Eudora errors happened.

Since the upgrade to 10.5.4, I have experienced one Finder error: - "can't complete operation" on a file that I have included on the Finder Sidebar (the left side of Finder windows). The error message seemed to have something to do with "special characters in the file name", although the name only had a one "-" in the name. I removed the file from the Finder Sidebar, renamed the file, and put it back in the Finder Sidebar. I have experience no other MacOS X-related errors so far.

Diagnostics with Disk Warrior shows a few file error of various kinds, but no errors on Eudora files or MacOS X files. Diagnostics with TechTool Pro show no file, disk drive, or disk surface errors.

Any ideas, folks?

I am going to consider a move to Mozilla Thunderbird if the Eudora errors continue.

However, I may do a reinstall of the OS as a precaution.

Anyone else having problems with Eudora on 10.5?

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance

Fred Ferd wrote:
> Up to and including 10.3.9, Eudora always worked nearly flawlessly -
> heck it has been a very, very, very long time. Stable, no problems
> past a few annoyances.
>
> As an aside, for Qualcomm to merely dump support is unconscionable.
> Unbelievable. Some of us have been loyal Eudora users for two
> decades, and loyal Qualcom customers since they took it over (16
> years?) I sincerely hope that the Qualcom executives that made this
> decision roast in hell. We all can take some consolation that they
> too will be abandoned by the supplier of software that they rely
> heavily on as this seems to be the way of the corporate world. These
> execs will get their one day - soon, no doubt.

How long were they supposed to support and upgrade a program when revenues < costs? It had become a charity, not a product.

David

On 23-Aug-2008, at 08:38, Fred Ferd wrote:
> Up to and including 10.3.9, Eudora always worked nearly flawlessly

Sure, as long as you didn't want secure passwords, IMAP, integration
with your Address Book, random signatures, or to receive email
attachments without having Eudora rip them apart from the message.

I used Eudora for years and despite the amount of praise it keeps
getting now that it's gone, there were other clients that were better
that I didn't use for various reasons. Cyberdog was brilliant, for
example. It was just ahead of its time and MacOS 8 did not handle
folders with tens of thousands of items in it, which made cyberdog
"dog slow" at times. I'd much rather see an OS X version of cyberdog
than of Eudora.

Yes, Eudora had some features that I still miss (auto correct mostly),
but it has some real stupidity ("chilies" anyone?) too. Eudora's rules
were decent, but there are much better options out there for excellent
sorting (Mailsmith).

Beyond that, it was never particularly stable for me under OS X
anyway. Mail.app is open on my machine for days at a time, Eudora had
a habit of needing to quit at least once a day. But then again, I
made the mistake of trying to have it access IMAP mail, and that is a
spectacularly bad idea with Eudora.


> As an aside, for Qualcomm to merely dump support is unconscionable.
> Unbelievable. Some of us have been loyal Eudora users for two
> decades, and loyal Qualcom customers since they took it over (16
> years?) I sincerely hope that the Qualcom executives that made this
> decision roast in hell. We all can take some consolation that they
> too will be abandoned by the supplier of software that they rely
> heavily on as this seems to be the way of the corporate world. These
> execs will get their one day - soon, no doubt.

To be fair, Eudora stopped being a money maker for Qualcomm years
before they dropped it. They sank a lot of money into it with
basically no return for a long time. I am not up on exactly what they
released to Mozilla, but of all the choices they had, I think they
chose the best option since pouring more money into it was not going
to happen.

> Any ideas, folks?

Eudora has been, effectively, EOLed for years. The only changes in
the last several years were minor maintenance releases. The fact that
it has issues with Leopard is no surprise at all.

> I am going to consider a move to Mozilla Thunderbird if the Eudora
> errors continue.

Thunderbird is pretty fugly. Its support for IMAP is good, its rules
are decent, its threading is excellent---and yet, it always leaves me
with a feeling that I can only describe as "Meh".

I use Mail.app. Its sorting is pretty weak, so I use procmail on the
server for sorting. I have issues where new mail sometimes doesn't
show up in the not-so-smart mailboxes, but it is still, overall, the
best client for OS X out there. And no, Erage is not an option for
me. My mailspool is currently about 7GB in nearly 1,000 different
folders and I can't trust Erage with that amount of data.

> Anyone else having problems with Eudora on 10.5?

Everyone is having some sort of troubles with Eudora under 10.5. it
works, but is fragile.

As an aside, why is this message showing up with a fake email address
<ferdexample..com>?

At 15:25 -0700 UTC, on 2008-08-23, LewisGmail wrote:

[...]

> access IMAP mail, and that is a spectacularly bad idea with Eudora.

I keep hearing people complain about Eudora's IMAP support, yet never hear
anything *specific*. After 15 years of POP I have just started experimenting
with IMAP, using Eudora. So far I haven't found any problems that are
obviously due to Eudora's IMAP support. But it's entirely possible I am not
yet pushing Eudora hard enough yet to notice.

I'd appreciate it if people would share concrete problems Eudora has with
IMAP. It might save me from running into serious problems once my IMAP usage
gets more serious. TIA.


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

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 3:40 AM, Sander Tekelenburg <tekelenbeuronet.nl> wrote:
> At 15:25 -0700 UTC, on 2008-08-23, LewisGmail wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> access IMAP mail, and that is a spectacularly bad idea with Eudora.
>
> I keep hearing people complain about Eudora's IMAP support, yet never hear
> anything *specific*. After 15 years of POP I have just started experimenting
> with IMAP, using Eudora. So far I haven't found any problems that are
> obviously due to Eudora's IMAP support. But it's entirely possible I am not
> yet pushing Eudora hard enough yet to notice.
>
> I'd appreciate it if people would share concrete problems Eudora has with
> IMAP. It might save me from running into serious problems once my IMAP usage
> gets more serious. TIA.

Well, the aspect of Eudora's IMAP support that caused me to move my
main company email away was Eudora's habit of occasionally
gratuitously moving messages from Inbox to Trash. At first I thought
I was doing it--then I caught Eudora in the act a few times. I
believe I recall that the problem was fixed but by then my use of
Eudora was limited to searching and reading old mail and sending some
stationery-based messages.

(I've never tried running Eudora under 10.5.x)

  --John

On 8/24/08 6:40 AM, "Sander Tekelenburg" <tekelenbeuronet.nl> wrote:

>> access IMAP mail, and that is a spectacularly bad idea with Eudora.
>
> I keep hearing people complain about Eudora's IMAP support, yet never hear
> anything *specific*. After 15 years of POP I have just started experimenting
> with IMAP, using Eudora. So far I haven't found any problems that are
> obviously due to Eudora's IMAP support. But it's entirely possible I am not
> yet pushing Eudora hard enough yet to notice.
>
> I'd appreciate it if people would share concrete problems Eudora has with
> IMAP. It might save me from running into serious problems once my IMAP usage
> gets more serious. TIA.

I had started to play with it from a "need to support it" POV, and after it
rather efficiently wiped my IMAP store 3 times in 3 days, (Love Da Backups),
I decided that Eudora + IMAP == terribly bad idea. As a theory, IMAP in
Eudora struck me as a feature added in because many people requested it, but
just enough work was done so it would barely function. Eudora is a highly
competent POP client. As an IMAP client? Not so much.

--
John C. Welch

>Up to and including 10.3.9, Eudora always worked nearly flawlessly -
>heck it has been a very, very, very long time. Stable, no problems
>past a few annoyances.
>[cut]
>Any ideas, folks?


These remarks based on Eudora 6.24 - iBook 1.33 768MB OS 10.5.4

With no experience using IMAP and eschewing HTML email like the
plague, Eudora continues to function well for me, Thank You.

There are several settings that can help a lot running Eudora under
Leopard. This one tops the list in my mind

(taken from the Eudora for Mac mailing list:
<http://listmoms.net/lists/>)
>Are you asking Eudora to play its built-in sound when new mail arrives?
>
>This has been implicated as a cause of crashes with Leopard,
>so you might try turning off any such option,
>or to substitute a "system" sound for Eudora's original sound.

A search on that list may well reveal other pertinent tips to
stabilize Eudora in Leopard.
Good luck,
fred c

My thoughts. Eudora 5.2.1 works without any issues on Leopard. Any issues that popped up while beta-testing it were fixed before it shipped. Since I don't have an IMAP account, disdain all HTML e-mail, selecting only plain text for sending and receiving, so I care less about HTML displaying, etc., the only error I see in Console->system.log is:

Aug 23 11:43:53 localhost /Applications/Eudora Application Folder/Eudora.app/Contents/MacOS/Eudora[1600]: _RemoveTimeTask(), the current time manager task 0x91bcd4 being removed is also currently executing its tmAddr routine, so unexpected things may result ( Radar #4555679 ).

However, that's having no effect on Eudora's operation.

If IDS can replicate Eudora 5.2.1 w/Odysseus, more power to them.

On 24-Aug-2008, at 04:40, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> At 15:25 -0700 UTC, on 2008-08-23, LewisGmail wrote:
>> access IMAP mail, and that is a spectacularly bad idea with Eudora.
>
> I keep hearing people complain about Eudora's IMAP support, yet
> never hear
> anything *specific*.

Specifics:

  *) Completely deleting all mail on the IMAP server on more than on
occasion
  *) Deleting only the NEW messages on the IMAP store
  *) failing to update the status of mailboxes
  *) Frequent and spectacular crashes when using IMAP, sometimes
necessitating replacing the Eudora settings file.

At 3:24 AM -0700 8/25/08, c richmond wrote:
>>Up to and including 10.3.9, Eudora always worked nearly flawlessly -
>>heck it has been a very, very, very long time. Stable, no problems
>>past a few annoyances.
>>[cut]
>>Any ideas, folks?
>
>
>These remarks based on Eudora 6.24 - iBook 1.33 768MB OS 10.5.4
>
>With no experience using IMAP and eschewing HTML email like the
>plague, Eudora continues to function well for me, Thank You.
>
>There are several settings that can help a lot running Eudora under
>Leopard. This one tops the list in my mind
>
>(taken from the Eudora for Mac mailing list:
><http://listmoms.net/lists/>)
>>Are you asking Eudora to play its built-in sound when new mail arrives?
>>
>>This has been implicated as a cause of crashes with Leopard,
>>so you might try turning off any such option,
>>or to substitute a "system" sound for Eudora's original sound.

I actually tracked this one down many years ago (and reported it to Apple)

Playing a synthesized sound while already sampled sound will cause
the Sound Manager to hang (while making noise, so it's really
annoying ) I duplicated this using Quicktime player and SoundJam
(which tells you how long ago this was )

All of Eudora's sounds are synthesized sounds (much smaller)

This was true in Mac OS 9 and 10.0/10.1; I didn't test again in 10.2 and later.
--
-- Marshall

At 03:40 on 24-08-2008, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> I'd appreciate it if people would share concrete problems Eudora
> has with IMAP.

I've never run the Eudora IMAP bugs that others have written about
because I've never been able to use IMAP on Eudora. I've tried a
couple of times, but Eudora doesn't seem to support disconnected mode
(or whatever it's called). That is, if I'm not on the network (e.g.
when travelling) I can't file emails away and otherwise manipulate
messages in IMAP boxes. A proper IMAP implementation would allow this
and then sync changes to the server when the network becomes
available. So far I haven't needed IMAP, which is fortunate because I
still haven't come across an email client that matches Eudora.

_________________
=> Jolin

On 25-Aug-2008, at 04:24, baltwo wrote:
> My thoughts. Eudora 5.2.1 works without any issues on Leopard.

depends on how you define "issues".

> Since I don't have an IMAP account,

You're already in a minority then.

For most of Aug 2008, <everyone-on-Tidbits> wrote:

> Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora.
> Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora.
> Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora.
> Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora.
> Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora. Eudora.

The funny thing to me is how much of an echo chamber Tidbits appears to
be as far as Eudora goes.

I have met & worked with, without too much exaggertion, hundreds of
average Mac users.

I can probably count the Eudora users among them on (part of) one hand.

Maybe there's selection bias going on. Maybe I'm in a weird Eudora-free
region of the country. But I don't think so.

The fact seems to me that the last handful of fanatical Eudora users
seems to have congregated on Tidbits, but most of the rest of the Mac
world has moved on to Apple Mail (mostly), Entourage (a large minority),
Thunderbird (a small minority), or web mail (probably more than all the
desktop mail clients combined). Everything else seems to have a single
digit percentage of the userbase or less -- usually much less.

So all this hemming & hawing about it on Tidbits to me seems like so
much arguing nostalgically about how great Studebakers were, back in the
day.

And I'm sure it was great, back in the day.

But that day has passed :-)



--
Chris Devers
I mean seriously, IMAP didn't work? Then what's the use?

On 26-Aug-2008, at 16:48, Chris Devers wrote:
> I have met & worked with, without too much exaggertion, hundreds of
> average Mac users.
>
> I can probably count the Eudora users among them on (part of) one
> hand.

That's more than I can count. Outside this list, I don't know anyone
who uses Eudora. The last I knew was my sister, who held on until
10.4, and she was last by a couple of years.

Barring the 'echo chamber'-like sound of Eudora in the tidbits realm... ;)

Can someone tell me precisely WHAT version of Eudora does work and with what plugins installed on a stock installation of Leopard 10.5.4 on an 8-core Mac running 10.5.4?

I have used Eudora for ages. I know what it can and can't do.

•It can do mail.

•It can quickly go through my email and delete all duplicate messages. It can do this in about 10 seconds with >150,000 messages in total. Mail.app with an applescript takes about an hour to go through 12000.

Eudora has also acquired this most annoying new talent of dying whenever it tries to send mail or to open new windows as a consequence of a filter. I do not have any sounds enabled. I have tried various iterations of Eudora 6.x. All to no avail. If I want to use it without it crashing, I have to revert to Tiger.

Odysseus is not yet ready for prime time. (yes, I've paid for it, but it still isn't near ready as of today).

Mail.app requires an inordinate amount of workarounds to get things reasonable (multiple source accounts requires an unobvious use of 'email accounts' in the setup pane as a place for a sequential entry of email addresses to be used, separated by a comma. How utterly obvious ;) (Shall I even mention Mail.app's amazing talent for deciding that a mailbox is empty even though it isn't, the finder says it isn't, its emlx files are still in the appropriate directory.... and it is still 'empty'?!)

So how do I get Eudora to work then?

[Maybe a VMWare install of Tiger on this mac and Eudora running in its own little virtual machine? ;) ]

On 27-Aug-2008, at 01:56, D.B. wrote:
> Barring the 'echo chamber'-like sound of Eudora in the tidbits
> realm... ;)
>
> Can someone tell me precisely WHAT version of Eudora does work and
> with what plugins installed on a stock installation of Leopard
> 10.5.4 on an 8-core Mac running 10.5.4?

5.1.1 works if you have no need for IMAP at all. IMAP is there, but
simply does not work reliably enough for anyone to run it. Anything
from 5.1.1 up to the last version (6.2.4) will run on Leopard. How
well is a question only you can answer.

6.2.4 Eudora
<http://www.eudora.com/download/>

Older installs
<http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/kb/2350hq.html>

> So how do I get Eudora to work then?

What we've been saying is that you don't. You WILL have issues with
Eudora on Leopard. Some people think these issues are worth dealing
with, most do not.

I am also a long time Eudora user from 1994. My Mail folder has over 800 items, and weighs in at 1.4GB. And I like Eudora! :-) Mine is a commercial version (6J Jr6), but the mailboxes started at version 1.3.7 or something like that.

Putting the discussion of what is new and neat aside, I'm also troubled with the fact that a "mere" .2 to .4 System upgrade renders a useful application useless. (and I thought I was careful enough to avoid 10.5.3)

What I've found so far to prevent Eudora from hanging in Mac OS X 10.5.4 (on top of not using Eudora sounds and using old style .toc files -- the latter may not matter, but that's how I have been using it): - Hide the progress window and keep it closed! (uncheck "show progress window when checking mail in background," or some setting that is similar)

I think the original poster's "_NSAutoreleaseNoPool()" errors flood the system when the progress window is open and Eudora goes to check/send/receive e-mail (it appears over 350 to 700 times within 2 or 3 seconds in the System Log). You can confirm this by having both the console system log open at the same time that Eudora is still running with the progress window open.

I've seen others say that the .4 upgrade affects all Rosetta apps accessing the network. I think this is true, as I've had Entourage X suffer as well. BTW, I have decided to use Entourage X, as 2004 does not support tunneling outside via a proxy server from within an Intranet -- If someone can show me how to use 2004 for this, please do so!(see similar posts from others, but I haven't seen a thread/discussion with a happy ending): http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage/msg/352551a3228c04ff

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=42855

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/macofficeentourage/Jun2005/post23320119.asp

Entourage X shows similar slowdown/hangs, but only when I'm using a proxy server, AND starting in 10.5.4.

So, my take is that something that affects the network related operations of Rosetta apps has been changed in Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4, and Eudora is a significant victim of this change.

Thanks for reading, and any hints are welcome, -- Heeday

Chris Devers

And I'm sure it was great, back in the day.

But that day has passed :-)

Yes, but some of us would like to keep it running long enough to find a suitable replacement.

It appears that the alternatives are still not there yet.

Nothing like the failure of the application that you depend on most to disrupt your life.

Ugh

At 12:56 AM -0700 8/27/08, D.B. wrote:

>Barring the 'echo chamber'-like sound of Eudora in the tidbits realm... ;)
>
>Can someone tell me precisely WHAT version of Eudora does work and
>with what plugins installed on a stock installation of Leopard
>10.5.4 on an 8-core Mac running 10.5.4?
>

D.B.:

I'm running Eudora 6.2.4 on an 8-core MacPro early 2008 2 x 2.8GHz
quad, 4GB RAM. OS X 10.5.4.

Plugins--Esoteric settings, Eudora Icons 6.0, Rot 13 carbon (never
use that anymore), SpamHeaders OS X, SpamWatch OSX, StaticJunkDB.txt,
UPPERlower Text OS X are listed in get info but I also have in Eudora
Folder stuff like Kill X-Sender and a boat load of tables. Stashed in
~/Library/Application Support/Eudora are BLAH-and-Others and
textsoap_cfmEudora from TextSoap 5.

Don't have any IMAP accounts and I have at least 27 personalities
(some outdated), a ton of filters and my Eudora Folder weighs in at
7.1GB.

Seems to work fine except when servers are misbehaving or Internet is
flaky. (Thank you TimeWarner cable for thos frequent DHCP lease
renewals that take multiple tries to connect.)


>I have used Eudora for ages. I know what it can and can't do.
>
>•It can do mail.
>
>•It can quickly go through my email and delete all duplicate
>messages. It can do this in about 10 seconds with >150,000 messages
>in total. Mail.app with an applescript takes about an hour to go
>through 12000.
>
>Eudora has also acquired this most annoying new talent of dying
>whenever it tries to send mail or to open new windows as a
>consequence of a filter. I do not have any sounds enabled. I have
>tried various iterations of Eudora 6.x. All to no avail. If I want
>to use it without it crashing, I have to revert to Tiger.
>

That stuff works fine here. Just some delays on mail delivery that
opening task progress usually fixes. Hogs CPU at times.


>Odysseus is not yet ready for prime time. (yes, I've paid for it,
>but it still isn't near ready as of today).
>
>Mail.app requires an inordinate amount of workarounds to get things
>reasonable (multiple source accounts requires an unobvious use of
>'email accounts' in the setup pane as a place for a sequential entry
>of email addresses to be used, separated by a comma. How utterly
>obvious ;) (Shall I even mention Mail.app's amazing talent for
>deciding that a mailbox is empty even though it isn't, the finder
>says it isn't, its emlx files are still in the appropriate
>directory.... and it is still 'empty'?!)
>
>So how do I get Eudora to work then?
>
>[Maybe a VMWare install of Tiger on this mac and Eudora running in
>its own little virtual machine? ;) ]

No major problems here.

--Jim

I just wanted to add that while having the progress window open tends to cause a hang, not having it open does not prevent a hang -- sometimes receiving an attachment or other actions can cause a hang. I'm frusrated and might reinstall 10.5.2... -- Heeday