In switching from Eudora on the PC to Mac Eudora, I've come across several annoyances. I'm sharing the pain.
There appears to be a serious bug in sorting mail by subject within a mailbox. I keep a mailbox (folder to non-Eudora users) with emails relating to events I am attending (conferences, etc.). I edit the subject line to put the date at the beginning of the line in YYMMDD format. By keeping the mailbox sorted I have a handy way of referencing by date-related emails by date. Pretty clever, huh? This worked fine for years on the PC, but on the Mac mail is mostly sorted properly but some items stubbornly appear in the wrong place. I've yet to think of a workaround. Of course, what I really want is to integrate these emails more with my calendar, but that's in the scope of Chandler.
The HTML rendering generally sucks. I see this is order confirmations from vendors who send HTML email. Fonts are wrong, plain ugly and the wrong size. Lines are randomly centered or right-justified which shouldn't be. I don't know which HTML renderer they are using on the Mac, but they should put it to sleep and start over. Worse, when rendering just plain text any time, anti-aliasing appears to be turned off. It's hard to read and hideously retro.
In replying to a message the body of the original is automatically selected. If, as I do, I typically want to include the entire body of the original in my reply, I have to remember to de-select before entering new text. So now my mantra is command-R up arrow, return, up arrow which produces the desired effect. On the PC the default it to include the body of the original in the reply but not select it, which is what I want. If they had done this, then it would take one keystroke to select the entire body which is not much of a burden. I have considered trying to use Quick Keys to create a little macro, but it seems like a lot of effort for not much result.
The home and end keys don't seem to do anything while editing text. I'm used to home moving the cursor to the beginning or the line and end to the, you guessed it, end of the line.
Posted by mitch@osafoundation.org at September 20, 2003 04:31 PMMitch, Eudora on the Mac is noticably lacking. Mozilla Mail and Apple Mail are both better alternatives and both have great bayesian spam filtering!
Posted by: Colin at September 20, 2003 09:01 PM
Colin is way, way on target. Eudora on the Mac stalled out years ago, with only minimal improvements. The Mozilla project has some good mail client code, Apple's Mail.app is OK in 10.2.6 and looks to be much, much better in 10.3 (Panther). Even Microsoft's Entourage is a decent client, although you only get it if you shell out for MS Office/Mac.
Bail on Eudora, it's not worth the pain. If care about your mailbox file format, try out the Mozilla mail code - Apple's Mail.app uses a broken-up variation on the standard mbox format, but Mozilla is still pretty clean.
Posted by: Joe at September 21, 2003 01:34 PM
If you're gonna try Mozilla mail, try Thunderbird! Granted its only at 0.2 but I find it very functional and It's taken the place of OE as my primary mail and news reader.
Posted by: Corey at September 21, 2003 07:30 PM
Over the years, I have come to distrust apps which run on Mac and Windows. Almost without exception the Mac version is always chasing the Windows version. It takes serious commitment to do Mac development, and it seems like most companies just trying to boost their sales by a few points by spinning out a Mac version with as little effort as possible.
While the large windows team is busy adding UI polish so that all interactions are speedy and pleasant, the small Mac team is scrambling to just make the thing not suck too badly.
The one company who seems to finally get this is Microsoft, the latest Mac versions of the Office suite are all very good.
I haven't looked at Mac Eudora for years, so I really have no way of knowing which caegory it falls in.
I'm quite happy with the built in Mail on OSX. Unified Inbox over multiple accounts, Mac address book integration, decent spam filtering, fast searching of large mailboxes. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done for me.
Posted by: Michael Toy at September 22, 2003 10:52 AM
Eudora has always had it's quirks. Having used it since the days of the Powerbook 100, I've never really got used to page, home and end keys, preferring space and option-arrow, and I tend to hit return at the end of a sentence, so my reply sequence is Apple-R, Up/Back, Type, Return.
Although it stagnated for a while, it's made some leaps with version 6 (at last with the 3-pane view). The spam filter is good, and nicely trainable (although, I suspect that the volume I receive on my eudoramail account has increased significantly since it appeared in the feature list).
I might be the last person in the world to prefer unsmoothed monaco to anti-aliased text.
If you've ever run into service problems with an ISP (like when they unilaterally decide to enforce authentication for sending without letting users know), Eudora is the mailer I fire up to see what is actually happening so I can work out what settings need changed for the Apple Mail or Outlook Express users.
There's a longer article somewhere on all the technologies it introduced me to (POP, MIME, filtering messages without needing to learn .maildelivery, handling multiple accounts sensibly, a level of customisability that only an X-Windows user could love).
Posted by: Simon Boyle at September 22, 2003 08:15 PM
Noting that I don't allow html email in the first place, this old, luddite, technology professional loves Mac Eudora and feels a need to stand up for it. Unlike you, I often want to delete the quoting, not so often I turn it off, but you and I would be doing equal time with the keystroke either way. More importantly, I like its rustic feel. The transparency that causes Simon Boyle to use it to work out problems with email accounts is, for me, the essence of utility. I am increasingly impatient with highly automated tools whose workings I can't easily understand.
Posted by: TQ White II at September 23, 2003 07:20 AM
The email client for you is BBEdit's Mailsmith! I think you get a discount if you are a BBEdit owner. Try it out. Yes, you have to buy it, but it is worth it not to have those mini JFK heads looking at you all day.
Posted by: Steven at September 23, 2003 11:21 AM
The Mac's cursor keys are supposed to do different things than the PC's; this has been the case since the introduction of the Extended Keyboard in 1997.
Home, end, page up, and page down move the scroll bar for the currently-focused view, not the insertion poin. Home and end move it to the top and bottom, and page up and page down are like clicking above and below the thumb in the bar.
I'm pretty sure Eudora does the right thing. Same with command- and option-arrow keys: Option-arrows move the insertion point left and right by a word and up and down by a page; command-arrows move the insertion point to the beginning and end of a line (left & right) and to the beginning and end of the document (up & down).
Oh, and the quoting convention? That's how Eudora has worked ever since Steve Dorner originally wrote it for the Mac at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s. It very easily supports the age-old Internet standard quoting convention where you put snippets of text being quoted above your reply to them.
(I totally agree about the HTML rendering though, it's awful. Until the release of Safari in June 2003, there wasn't a *good* standard HTML rendering library on the Mac at all. And that's only available on machines running 10.2.6 or later with Safari installed.)
All that said, I'm using Mail.app now. It's much more polished than Eudora, and it's getting a lot of love from Apple because it's what they use internally. Plus I go nuts now if I don't have standard Cocoa text editing features available (like inline spellchecking, Services support, and emacs editing keys).
Posted by: Chris Hanson at September 24, 2003 12:33 AM
See link on my name below for my discussion of mail quoting conventions (top vs. bottom posting, etc.).
Posted by: Dan at October 3, 2003 01:25 PM
I use email client Oulook Express. I have read a lot of messages about people comming up with some good ideas for anti-spam software or anti-spam services. There is a very good software program called Spam Bully. As far as the spam issue goes I use Spam Bully and now after bouncing spam for a couple of weeks no more spam. Might give it a try but like It took a couple of weeks to stop getting spam in my hotmail account after learning spambully.
Posted by: digital camera at July 8, 2004 12:20 PM