Review: Eudora Pro 6.2

Product Name: Eudora Pro 6.2
Company: Qualcomm
URL: http://www.eudora.com
Category: E-mail client
Price: $50
Requirements: Any Power Mac running OS X or OS 9
Rating: 3 Bounces - Lustworthy

While the roots of Eudora go back to the late 1980s, the current version runs on PowerPC Macs running OS X and OS 9.

Eudora was the very first e-mail client application I ever used, back when I was using an LC running System 7. Compared with the Telnet or the text-based alternatives that MS-DOS users had, it’s graphical interface and easy to use mailbox format was simply amazing. In many ways Eudora set the standard for e-mail applications as far as I was concerned, and every program I’ve used since has been compared, more or less successfully, with Eudora. In fact, I basically stuck with Eudora up until I switched to OS X, after which point Apple’s Mail program seemed more than adequate.

But over the last few years, I’ve noticed that Mail isn’t exactly the perfect e-mail client. For one thing, it’s slow and temperamental, and there do seem to be all sorts of bugs hidden within it. These annoyances appear to become more apparent the heavier your use of the program is, and one thing that is obvious to me is that as a program it was designed for users with light to moderate e-mail demands. Once you start collecting and organising thousands of e-mails and send a hundred or more in a week, then Mail starts creaking a bit. Hanging connections to mailservers, rules that cannot be opened and edited, and spontaneously appearing or disappearing mailboxes all seem to be quite commonly observed manifestations of Mail failing under pressure.

So what are the alternatives? One popular choice is of course to use an on-line e-mail service such as GMail or Hotmail, but if you need to access multiple accounts or like to have the messages and attachments on your computer at all times, then these aren’t really workable. Alternative e-mail clients for the Mac do exist, one of which, Microsoft Entourage, I looked at a little while ago. But Eudora remains a very popular solution, in part because it is a scalable solution, with a free Lite version for users with modest needs cranking up through a Sponsored version through to a fully blown Pro version selling for just shy of fifty bucks. The Sponsored version is essentially identical to the Pro version, but with (fairly discreet) advertisements built in, and lacking SpamWatch, a system that allows Eudora to improve it’s built-in spam filters.

Installation

The program itself is a 7.6 MB download from the Eudora web site, including a PDF-format quick-start guide. The full the User Guide manual is an additional 5.4 MB. The installer puts the full application onto your hard drive, and by default Eudora sets itself up in the sponsored mode. Switching off the advertisements decreases the feature set to create Eudora Lite, while entering a registration code removes the advertisements and so converts the program to Eudora Pro.

By modern standards, Eudora has very modest requirements and essentially any Mac running OS X or OS 9 will run the program nicely. The program has a miniscule footprint, taking up around 10 MB of disk space, although this excludes the actual mailboxes themselves.

Incidentally, Eudora doesn’t place your mailboxes in the Library folder, as does Mail, but instead creates and uses a Eudora Folder in your Documents folder. Perusing the Eudora Folder will reveal some significant differences between this program and Mail, and these have some important implications for users. One of the most obvious differences is that Eudora simply writes the messages to what are essentially plain text files, meaning that they can easily be read in any text editor. In contrast Mail packages the messages away inside “.mbox” files that can only be opened and viewed with difficulty. Moreover, Each Mail .mbox contains a bunch of files that index and arrange the messages when they are viewed in by the Mail application, and the experience of many Mac users has been that should these supplementary files become corrupted, that’s when Mail starts to act screwy.

Whereas Mail (left) stores messages inside packages along with additional data files, Eudora (right) simply writes the messages into one large text file per mailbox.

Eudora and Mail continue to differ in this fundamental way in many other regards as well, with Mail favouring property file lists (or .plist files) for things like e-mail signatures and message sorting (rules) whereas Eudora tends towards writing these sorts of things down in plain text files. A very striking difference is in how they handle attachments. Mail keeps attachments encrypted within the actual mail file, whereas Eudora removes them from the message, decrypts them, and stores them inside the Attachments folder. This makes them much easier to find and view.

Attachments are stored inside their own folder, and by using something like Pic2Icon to create previews, this folder can easily be turned into a place to archive pictures from friends and family.

Upgrading from Mail

Having installed Eudora and had a quick look over how the program looks after your messages, the time now comes to put Eudora to work. If you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Eudora, then Eudora Pro 6 will immediately take over your existing mailboxes, address book, and settings, but what about if you’re moving over from Mail?

A simple wizard takes you through the import process, which allows you to bring messages across from Mail, as well as a variety of other e-mail clients.

Eudora is able to import your messages and settings without much fuss. In fact the only real issue I came across was that many messages and mailboxes were erroneously marked as unread. The solution is to select all the messages that are unread and mark them as read, not in itself a complex operation. But if you have a lot of mailboxes to go through, this can be a bit tiresome.

Eudora erroneously marks messages as unread after importing them from Mail, but they can be quickly marked as read manually.

Regardless of this slight hitch, my mail seemed to have been imported without any losses. Eudora did alert me to cases where attachments failed to be carried across with the messages, but these occurred infrequently: of about 300 attachments, only a couple didn’t get copied across.

Rarely, Eudora had problems importing attachments.

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in switching from Mail to Eudora isn’t the actual importing of the messages themselves, but the things that make using Mail elegant and simple, specifically the mail sorting rules (what Eudora calls “filters”) and the way Mail is tightly integrated with the OS X Address Book. If you’ve crafted a bunch of Rules in Mail to send messages from the main Inbox to separate folders, those will need to be re-created from scratch in Eudora. Likewise, although Eudora can import the information from the OS X Address Book into its own, it cannot write to the OS X Address Book, so any changes you make to details in one of them will need to be manually copied across to the other. Basically, you’re going to want to choose to use one or the other and then stick with it: trying to keep two different address book files in sync is just to much of a hassle.

Using Eudora

Eudora hasn’t changed much in ten years, and the basic layout of the program will be very familiar to anyone who has used the program in the past. People coming over from Apple’s Mail application will see some differences though, some superficial, like the arrangement of the preferences panel, but others rather more profound.

The Dock icon for Eudora displays the number of new messages in the main inbox.

There are some similarities though, with things like iconic buttons for tasks like checking mail or marking a message as spam being present in both Eudora and Mail. In fact Eudora has a rather larger selection of these, and pretty much anything from the menu bar can be inserted as an icon on the floating palette as well. Again like Mail, the Eudora dock icon is functional, showing the number of new messages and allowing you to quickly toggle between windows.

A settings control panel allows the user to enter and modify accounts, change fonts and alert sounds, and so on.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Mail and Eudora is that Eudora largely ignores what server a message came from and prefers to handle messages by slipping them into one or other mailbox. So all messages from all mailboxes go into the Inbox unless filtered off to the Junk mailbox, the Trash mailbox, or any one of the user-created ones. In contrast, Mail leaves messages in mailboxes specific to a certain account unless instructed to do otherwise, and this goes as much for Junk and Trash as it does for useful e-mail.

Once the user has created their own mailboxes for messages from different people or concerned with specific projects, filtering rules can be created to siphon off messages from the main inbox to any one of these special mailboxes. This is essentially identical to the Mail’s Rules and no more (or less) tricky to do. As noted before, although Eudora will import pre-existing mailboxes from Mail, it doesn’t carry across the rules, so you’ll need to create those again yourself. Eudora was originally designed as a menu-based program, and mailboxes can be accessed through the menu bar, and any mailboxes with new messages in them will be underlined. But Eudora can also mimic the visual interface of Mail, and by pulling out a tab from the side of the window, icons representing the mailboxes are visible, again underlined if there are unread messages in them.

Messages can be stored in special mailboxes, which are underlined when they contain new messages.

Performance

On my 1 GHz G4 PowerBook, Eudora performed exceptionally well. Where I find Mail tends to be slow or unstable at times, especially with things like deleting messages from servers, Eudora functioned without any noticeable errors or slowdowns. Subjectively at least, Eudora feels about twice as fast as Mail.

Besides simply being faster and more robust when it comes to downloading and sorting messages, Eudora includes some tools that make handling and processing messages much more efficient. As someone who has to rely on a 56k modem from time to time, one of the things I’ve always liked about Eudora is its ability to download just a part of a message. By setting Eudora just to load the first 8 or 12 KB or a message, you usually get all the short text messages and enough of the longer ones to decide whether or not you want to download the entire thing. Attachments, be they pictures of the kids sent by grandma or spyware sent by spammers, are left on the server, and by reading the accompanying message you can decide whether or not to download the attachment, save it for later, or simply delete the entire thing. OS X Mail has nothing like this; at best it will ask you whether or not you want to download a message above a given size, but you have no information about whether it’s from grandma or someone pushing porn or Viagra.

Spam

Eudora Pro comes with two key tools in its anti-spam kit, SpamWatch and ScamWatch. SpamWatch is essentially a way for Eudora to improve its ability to recognise spam e-mails. Users of OS X Mail will be familiar with “training” this program over time (usually a couple of weeks), and SpamWatch is essentially similar. By clicking on a button to mark as spam any messages that are not recognised as such, Eudora improves its spam filter making subsequent attempts at identifying spam even more effective.

But even out of the box, I was very impressed with Eudora’s spam filters. I have two obsolete accounts that have been running for upwards of ten years and garner essentially nothing more than spam anymore. Typically, they collect something like one hundred spam e-mails a day. Accessing these accounts didn’t seem to faze Eudora at all, with perhaps one in a hundred spam messages not recognised as spam and left in my inbox. Even on accounts with a mix of real and spam e-mail Eudora performed well, and only once did a real message get flagged as spam, and in this case the message was an electronic notification that an e-card had been sent to me and not a regular, handwritten message.

Eudora has very effective spam filters, in my experience filtering off 99% of the spam and almost never mistakenly marking real messages as spam.

There is one caveat to all this spam sorting loveliness is this: Eudora doesn’t accurately scan messages that are only incompletely downloaded from a remote server. As mentioned above, downloading just the first 8 or 12 KB or a message can be a great timesaver if you have a slow Internet connection, allowing you to quickly read the text part of most e-mails without having to wait for the attachments. But where spam messages include HTML or encoded attachments (sadly all too often nowadays) Eudora can’t read enough (if any) of the message in the first few kilobytes to make a fair call on whether the message is spam or not.

ScamWatch is an anti-phishing technology that flags messages containing links purporting to go to one web site but actually linking to another. These are invariably contained in messages pretending to be from businesses like eBay, PayPal, and major US banks or mimicking commercial web sites such as Amazon.com. The idea behind this confidence trick is that the sender of the message dupes naïve readers to logging onto a fake web site and entering all sorts of personal information, such as bank account details, social security numbers, and passwords. These can then be used fraudulently to steal money. The problem is that some of these messages are very realistic, at least on first glance, but Eudora pre-empts this by sending a message to the user explaining the problem and describing the risk.

ScamWatch flags messages containing links pretending to go to one place but actually going somewhere else.

Visual bugs and glitches

One of the most disappointing things about Eudora is its lack of graphical finesse. Compared with most other commercial OS X applications, Eudora looks and feels clunky. There’s no evidence of proper anti-aliasing of text in some parts of the program, for example in the mail reader window where text is often edged by an ugly white shadow. In contrast, Mail and even Microsoft Entourage manage to consistently look like modern OS X program, with anti-aliased text throughout regardless of font size. Possibly this difference can be put down to Eudora needing to work in both OS X and OS 9 versions of the Mac operating system, but it still looks pretty nasty.

Text in the message window is relatively ugly by OS X standards.

Dialog boxes, error messages, and other aspects of the interface are often ugly and deliver unhelpful statements that don’t really fit in with the idea of the Mac being easy to use. At other times things like buttons didn’t mesh properly with the text they were associated with, creating a sense of visual disharmony that definitely feels out of place in OS X.

What’s this about? Answers on a postcard to the usual address!

Text and buttons don’t always line up properly, exacerbating Eudora’s clunky feel.

Finally, and by far the most annoying visual glitch were disappearing mailboxes. While they hadn’t actually gone anywhere, the icons for them in the mailbox tab that folds out to one side of the main window certainly did vanish. Closing and opening the tab brought them back, but this is still the sort of thing the Mac users react badly to, and detracts from an otherwise exceptionally solid program.

Now you see me, now you don’t. Sometimes the icons for mailboxes weren’t drawn; closing and then opening the mailbox tab again brought them back.

Conclusion

This review really only skims the surface of Eudora, and there’s much I haven’t dwelt on, such as the built-in emoticon graphics, mail-to-spam statistics, built-in auto reply mode, and directory services for finding people on intranets and the Internet. What I’ve concentrated on is the stuff that will make a difference to people thinking of migrating from OS X Mail.

Eudora can be summed up as a powerful, very fast e-mail client that comes with lots of power-user features and an exceptionally reliable spam filter only let down by an imperfect user interface and the inability to use pre-existing Mail rules and the OS X Address Book. Casual users wanting a free e-mail client will probably find Apple’s Mail application prettier if not necessarily better, but heavy users will definitely find Eudora Pro the best option. Compared with Mail it handles multiple accounts just as well but more quickly, and things like being able to download just part of a message make it an excellent choice for those who get a lot of spam mail or have a slow Internet connection such as a modem.

Purely as an e-mail client Eudora probably deserves the coveted four bounces, but I just can’t get past the glitchy user interface and the sometimes unhelpful error messages. Thus, it gets just three bounces. That’s still a good score of course, but Eudora is such a good program otherwise I’d really like to see the interface tightened up so I could award it the full marks it really deserves. Expect AppleLust to keep an eye on Eudora in the future.

- Dr. Neale Monks

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