One man's 2 cents

[Staxman]

Hope I'm not too late with this! I've never used Eudora; I'm not sure I've even downloaded it. So what am I doing here? I'm using Apple Mail under OS X, and it's pretty good overall, but it could be better. Hopefully there won't be a conflict between what I'd like to see and what the Eudora user base wants. Who knows, maybe I'll love the features inherited from Eudora!

1) I'd like the ability to redirect a given email. Long story short, I sometimes move emails back and forth between Apple Mail (on my local HD) and a Web-based email account I have--I have my reasons for doing this. If I have an email sent by Joe Smith on 7/29/02 and I forward it, it shows up in the target mail box as being sent by me today. If I redirect it, it should show up as being sent by Joe Smith on 7/29/02. If I sort my emails by date, it should sort according to the original date. If you examine the headers on the original email and the redirected email, there's a difference, but there's no obvious difference if you don't look at the headers.

2) When I redirect (as explained above) to my Apple Mail account, the original sender info (Joe Smith) is preserved, but the email shows up as being sent today--not what I want. Also, I just did a test redirect of a 3-y.o. email from Apple Mail to my Web-based email, and it showed up in the Web-based mail as being sent today. I don't know if this was a function of Apple Mail, the Web-based mail, or both. PMMail/2, an OS/2 mail client that I used to use, did it the way I prefer, both coming and going.

3) Naturally, I'd want to be able to import my existing Apple Mail database into Odysseus. (Ability to import the folder structure and filters/rules would be nice too!) But I'd also like to be able to export the DB in a standard format (such as mbox) if it ever comes to that. I was once perusing the website of a 3rd-party OS X mail client, and it said in so many words, "We want you to use our client because it's the best, not because we've locked you into a proprietary file format." I'd hope that IDS would take the same attitude.

4) I'd like more in the way of searching capabilities than Apple Mail offers. PolarBar, a mail client I used for a while, that let me search mail every which way! I tried to attach a screen shot of PolarBar's search dialog, but the board keeps telling me the image file is invalid. How can I get it to you? (Unfortunately, PolarBar didn't meet criterion 3, so I still have separate PB and Apple Mail databases.) I've also thought it would be nice to be able to do (for example) a primary sort by sender and a secondary sort by date. I don't know if any mail client has ever had this. If not, this is your chance to score a first.

BTW, I'm assuming that Odysseus will be shareware, not freeware. Assuming that the reg fee is reasonable, and I imagine it will be, I'm OK with that.

Thanks!

[mediamover1]

I use Windows and therefore can't comment on Applemail features, but Eudora has a turbo-redirect feature by default and other redirects. Its rapid search feature is excellent. I have never tested the limits of how many parameters one can set in a search, but I've used as many as 7.

Eudora is the best. I always used the paid version of it & it ran about 40 dollars to upgrade every couple of years. I found that to be more than reasonable, considering its many features.

I have 10 years of mail in Eudora..I would be lost without it. I back it up at least once a day.

[jolinwarren]

Staxman: It sounds like the existing Eudora would suit you well, so if Odysseus lives up to its promise then I imagine it will be a great client for you. For the record, Eudora already does (and has for a while) all the points you've requested, including very flexible search and multiple sort criteria (some of my mailboxes have three or four search criteria applied -- by label then by status then by date then by sender, etc.). Redirects work as expected and as you've requested. And in other threads, IDS have stated that they will be using a standard SQL database to store messages and made it clear they will provide exporters to get messages out of the Odysseus databases and into mbox files.

[Tom]

3) Naturally, I'd want to be able to import my existing Apple Mail database into Odysseus.

I don't know whether or not they'll have importers specifically for Apple's mail storage format, this being a cross-platform app. But, presumably, Odysseus will import mbox, since that's quite widely used on several platforms. If so - since Apple Mail will export to mbox format - you're home and dry. It's not immediately obvious how to export to mbox from Apple Mail, but it can be done:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 6201156481

Most email clients seem to expect to find an mbox file inside a folder, so you may have to put it in one for an importer to find it. The only other glitch that comes to mind is the issue around control characters. Mail clients that use mbox work around the problem that they've got all the records in the same file and need to know where to, as it were, "split" it by looking for "From" in the headers. Since the word "From" can also appear in the text of a mail a kludge is often used whereby, if someone uses "From" in the body, the mail user agent adds a control character. Not all versions of mbox use the same control character, which can cause messages to be broken at the wrong place.

There's a very recent macosxhints post that claims that the "Archive" function in Mail in Leopard also exports to mbox:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 7063331802

That's, in fact, not true. What you get appears to be a single file, but if you examine it, you'll find it's actually a bundle. However it looks as though one of the files in the bundle is an mbox file - there's two, and the other one is labelled table_of_contents and looks to have binary data in it.

[Staxman]

Thanks for all the responses--what I'm hearing is very encouraging! At the risk of beating the redirect issue to death, I'll relate a sitch I encountered today:

This morning before the start of my shift at work, I logged onto my Web-based email and knocked out a quick email to a friend. In these sitches, I normally BCC myself at my regular email address and then download the BCC onto my local HD (now approaching Acronym City limits!). This is a close, long-term friend, and I've archived all our correspondence for years in a dedicated folder. Both his emails to me and vice versa, so I can follow both sides of the correspondence.

This time I forgot to BCC myself. Tonight at home, ~11 hours after sending the original message, I logged onto my webmail, redirected it to myself, and downloaded it into Apple Mail. If I open the message, it has the original timestamp from when I composed it in Webmail. But if I close the message and view all the messages in that folder, the message shows up w/the timestamp of the time I redirected it. If I sort the messages by date, it sorts accordingly. In this case, this is the first email to pass between us in a couple of days, and my friend has yet to reply to it, so NBD. But if my friend had replied b4 I redirected it, his reply would show up in Apple Mail as being sent b4 my original message to him. I don't know if this is a function of the webmail, Apple Mail, or both. And this is only one of several possible scenarios where I might redirect an email.

I should mention that I have my own domain. All my outgoing messages have a "From" address of "myname@mydomain.com" (not literally, but you get the idea), whether I compose them in Apple Mail or webmail. All my incoming mail to this address is forwarded to both my Apple Mail and my webmail.

As I said, I'm probably belaboring the point, but this feature is important to me, and I'd hate to have a miscommunication. If Eudora in fact works the way I'd like, great, and I hope IDS won't fix what isn't broken.

If I end up exporting my DB to mbox, it'll have to be under Tiger--my Mac is too slow for Leopard.

BTW, another friend of mine is a long-term Eudora/Windows user, and knowing him, I suspect his mail DB runs into gigabytes. When I passed the word on to him about Odysseus, he said, "This is GOOD news. I'd resigned myself to using Eudora until it no longer worked, then throwing myself out a window in despair."

[phineas]

You really should be using Eudora. It's designed specifically to store both sides of the email conversation and does so incredibly well. That's the main reason I use Eudora, and have done so on both Windows and the Mac for nearly 15 years.

In my Eudora installation, all the important people and companies I correspond with have their own folders. Rules automatically route both incoming and my outgoing messages to the appropriate folders. It's completely automatic for me. I never have to DO anything. Eudora's rules can even be configured to open the mailbox (or the message) from a specific, important correspondents as each message arrives -- so you'll be sure to see them.

If you're using something like gmail as your webmail, you could create a gmail account in Eudora and just access your messages via POP, or go back and forth between webmail and pop if that's what you need to do.

[MikeA]

Staxman, I suspect it's Yours Truly you're talking about. I've used Eudora for so many years that I can no longer remember when I first saw it. One forum participant said: "Eudora is the true power user email application." Agreed. The same person wrote: Thunderbird was a big disappointment. Also agreed -- very flawed program. I'm glad I didn't lose any mail during the short time I used it. I un-installed it right quick. As you noted I'd resigned myself to losing Eudora some day. But it will be living on with a modern code base. What a good deal, and thanks to this dev team for taking on the project.

Plain text. I've always loved the plain-text 'mind-set' of Eudora -- as in, its not being the least bit interested in executing 'active content'. The plain-text approach is a huge plus in these days of having one's system peeked-into and poked-at without one's consent via sundry cute little gizmos embedded in messages or web sites. May Eudora's replacement always remain plain-text-ish.

HTML mail. Eudora (I'm using paid mode v.6.1.2.0) is sometimes beastly about displaying certain companies' HTML-formatted mail. One company regularly sends HTML mail in a way that Eudora simply can't display; it can't even display the first line in the mail -- the line reading 'click here to read this message on the web'! It would be great if there were an option to display any and all HTML messages as text -- _with_ links displayed (clickable or not -- but at least displayed).

The problem seems to be that company's insistence on delimiting its HREF attributes with apostrophes rather than double quote-marks. What they're doing is 'HTML-legal,' but as far as I can tell Eudora can't handle those kinds of delimiters...and the entire message simply disappears.

Searching. I have no prejudice about the mail being stored in SQL-ish fashion. But how easy will be to be to search within it? When all else fails, I can whip up a Q&D Perl script for regular-expression searches outside the Eudora UI. In the new program, I hope there'll be a way of doing pattern-matching searches within the UI; or a plug-in system that allowing such a feature to be added by a third party; or a way of exporting a mailbox as plain text, so that a roll-your-own search can be done rapidly outside the UI.

Keyboard shortcuts. A few years ago, Qualcomm 'improved' the program by dropping out certain useful keystrokes -- another case of 'hey, it ain't broken, so let's fix it'. One of them was a keystroke for putting the focus into the mailbox pane. I haven't been able to do that for a long time. The mouse is required, alas. Another 'fix' Qualcomm provided was a change of edit control -- or else for some other reason they changed the decidedly non-sexy but stil extremely useful keystrokes Control+PgUp and Control+PgDn, which used to move the cursor to the top and bottom of the current window (not the top and bottom of the entire editing buffer). That kind of feature is very useful in editing large messages and I hope it can be part of the Odysseus edit-control.

FCC feature. Eudora's 'FCC' feature is very useful. I hope it can be retained (or something like it). One thing the feature is missing: the ability to save a list of 'favorite FCC folders' in a context menu. You have to select the 'FCC' folder manually every time. A shortcut taking the form of a stored favorites-list would be great. (I suppose the alternative would be to create a rule; that can be done now, though I do like the 'FCC' feature.)

I saw a feature-request here for an auto 'Fcc to original mailbox' option -- that's a great one. Gets my vote.

Could it be possible, if an 'always save to FCC folder "x"' option is used, NOT to duplicate the saved message in the 'Sent Items' folder? That's a lot of unnecessary duplication, over time.

Address book. Eudora has some excellent config options, including the ability to enable and disable warnings. One option it _doesn't_ have: an 'are you sure?' warning when you highlight an address-book entry and then press the Del key. It's been a while since I accidentally deleted the wrong address-book item, but it has happened. Hopefully that kind of warning would be available at least as an option.

Message list. Eudora has an odd way of supporting finding items within a mailbox when you've got them sorted. For instance, sort by 'Who'...but then if you type the first letter of the name you're looking for, the highlight-bar jumps to some other place entirely from what you're expecting. If this kind of feature is to be supported in the future, it would be great if it worked better than it now works in Eudora (which is to say, not at all).

'Return receipt.' An option to get confirmation when a message is delivered to the recipient -- if there's a way to do this in Eudora, I haven't yet figured it out. (RTFM problem?)

Thanks again to the devs for taking on this project.

[davert]

To get a return receipt, try the squarish white-with-green-square icon.