Eudora
Current Version: 6.1.1 (May 20, 2004) / 6.2.4 (October 12, 2006)
Eudora used to be the king of the free third party Macintosh email applications. It supports SMTP, POP and IMAP servers, stationery, provides multiple mailboxes, filtering, offline reading and replying, and - most importantly - is very, very reliable.
Version 6.2.4 is officially the last commercial version of the old Eudora application that is so well-known and loved. On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm announced:
"Future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program. Future versions of Eudora will be free and open source, while retaining Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements. Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project, with a view to enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of both Eudora and Thunderbird.
"Qualcomm also today announced that it has released the final commercial versions of the current Eudora products for Windows and Mac operating systems. The open source version of Eudora is targeted to release during the first half of calendar year 2007. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, Qualcomm will cease to sell Eudora commercially. In the interim, Qualcomm will continue commercial sales, at a reduced price of $19.95 and with a six-month period of technical support. Existing technical support commitments will be honored in their entirety.
"'I'm excited for Eudora to be returning to the open source community,' said Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for Qualcomm's Eudora Group. 'Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before.'"
Andrew Starr's Unofficial Eudora Site links to more information about the new product (codenamed "Penelope"), including a discussion forum. The official "Penelope" development page has more information, and as of September 2007, you can try out the latest (beta) release below!
No longer available in "Paid" mode (which was equivalent to the old Eudora Pro, but which required an annual subscription fee), Eudora 6 can now be run in one of two "modes" - "Sponsored" mode, which gives you all the features of the former "Paid" mode (except for spam filtering) for free, displaying advertisements as you use the program; and "Light" mode, which eliminates several of the coolest features of the program (but doesn't display advertising, either), giving users an equivalent to the old "Eudora Light" application, albeit a much more up-to-date version. Sponsored mode adds many features, including a built-in spelling checker and more sophisticated message filtering.
Eudora versions 5.1 and later are for Power Macs only; users of 680x0 Macs will have to keep using the older Eudora Light software, which is still available.
At any rate, version 6.2.4 added/changed the following:
- Make sure Eudora labels get refreshed after changing via settings
- Using semicolon instead of colon after the scheme no longer confuses scamwatch
- Port numbers no longer befuddle scamwatch.
- Internal whitespace in hostname of link text was confusing scamwatch
- Putting mailbox names on some IMAP errors that didn't have them
- Visit Web Site now goes to different server
- shift-open address book now selects the entry with the email address of the current message
- New Mail.app Importer (v 1.1), handles Tiger mail folder layout.
- Updated StaticJunkDB.txt to help with changes in spammer's techniques
- Added preference for hiding the "Change Password" menu item
- Fixed problem with pasted graphics on fileid-deficient filesystems like SMB
- Moved 'Save Password' to password entry dialog
- "Visit Web site" opens the Eudora folder if the option key is held down
- Redesigned password dialog to include more information
- Patch for finding attachments (esp IMAP) on systems that don't support fileid's
- Fixed crash importing address book entries
- Fixed potential crash cleaning up Out.temp at startup
- Address Book import gets correct address for groups from distribution list
- Recognizing PNG files from "extension" only
- No longer deleting messages on delete key autorepeat
- Worked around Safari's habit of putting text in what should be picture drags/copies
- Added <x-eudora-setting:197> to turn off the Services menu in Eudora
- Links that began with newlines could fool scamwatch
- Adjusted spacing of radio buttons in various settings panels.
- <x-eudora-setting:13918> is a comma-separated, case-sensitive list of words MoodWatch will ignore
As of version 6.2, new versions of Eudora are available for Mac OS X only; as of versions 6.0 / 6.1, support for PowerMacs was limited to those machines running OS 9 or higher; older versions may be purchased through http://www.soft-net.co.uk.
Be sure to check out Andrew Starr's Eudora for Macintosh Page for more information regarding the unique capabilities of this outstanding program.
In order for Macintosh Eudora to work well under OS X 10.5.x 'Leopard', you need to turn off the use of specific sounds in Eudora. These are the sounds Eudora plays when you get new mail or Eudora needs your attention, or are played by Filters. The sounds that are problematic are the ones that contain 'Eudora' in their name as they were created using a sound synthesizer that Leopard does not support. To disable or change the sounds used in Eudora, do the following:
Turn off or change the 'New Mail' and "Attention" sounds:
- Open Eudora->Preferences and select the 'Getting Attention' panel
- In the 'Sounds' section, for both 'New mail sound' and 'Attention sound', select a sound OTHER than one that has 'Eudora' in its name (ie. NOT 'Eudora Attention', 'Eudora New Mail' nor 'Eudora Short Warning')
- Click OK to the close the Preferences
Turn off sounds triggered by filters:
- Open Window->Filters
- Look through all your filters for filters that have a 'Play Sound' action.
- Select a sound that does NOT have 'Eudora' in its name, or disable sounds all together by selecting 'None' from the action popup menu.
User Reviews
"I actually love this software. It is easy to use, there is so much freedom to set user preferences. If you have as many Internet addresses as I do--five which I check daily--with the click of the mouse, you can retrieve your mail from any server without the hassles of constantly changing or forwarding your mail to a designated mailbox. It is a must have."
—Lauren M. Ferguson, MLS
"I respectfully disagree. I have at least two other mail programs, one of which comes "free" with OS X, that check multiple accounts easily for me. To me at least 50% of communication is in the presentation. If you do not communicate your point clearly and with impact you are missing the boat. Unfortunately, Eudora's output, particularly of graphically designed html-based email, is simply ugly and unacceptable. The makers have much work to do, particularly if they hope to get money for this program or be allowed to pester you with advertisements. And it is also unacceptable, in the OS X version, to force you to load Classic when you click on an ad. This app is clearly hampered by an old-fashioned mindset."
—Tim M. Beckwith
Submit another review!
Eudora Light 3.1.3 (for 680x0 Macs).
Eudora 6.1.1 for Power Macs running OS 9.0 or later.
Eudora 6.2.4 for Mac OS X (Carbon).
to the eMailman.com plug-ins page to download just a few of the many fine plug-ins for Eudora.
Version 1.0RC1 of Eudora "OSE" (Open Source Edition) for Mac OS X 10.4+ (Carbon / Universal; July 7, 2010) is the tenth "Penelope" release based upon Mozilla Thunderbird, adding a slew of new features (the changes are only for Eudora and Penelope, and all changes made by Thunderbird are not listed):
- Toolbar icons (and a few other icons) from the original Eudora were moved to Penelope.
- Keyboard shortcuts from the original Eudora were moved to Penelope. You can configure whether these shortcuts in Penelope or the original Thunderbird ones are used in the Penelope panel of the Options/Preferences dialog.
- The menu structure of original Eudora has been copied to a great extent in Penelope.
- Added the ability to display the list of mailboxes in a separate window from the mailboxes themselves, which was similar to the original Eudora. This can be configured in the Penelope panel of the Options/Preferences dialog. Mailboxes opened in a separate window have their size/position remembered and restored when opened up next.
- Double-clicking or hitting Enter/Return on a mailbox in the folders list now opens up the mailbox in a separate window.
- The toolbar customization dialog was modified to be similar to the way it was implemented in original Eudora.
- Modified the mailbox column headers to look like original Eudora's.
- The "Sender" column has been relabeled as "Who", and outgoing messages display the name of the recipient there. This feature can be controlled by the hidden pref "mail.useWhoColumn".
- You can quickly find messages in a mailbox by typing text in the list of messages. As you type the selection in the mailbox will change based on matching text in the Who and Subject fields. After finding a match you can use the period key to find subsequent matches in the mailbox (and Shift+period to find previous matches).
- Added the Group Select feature from original Eudora where if you hold down the Alt key (option for Mac) and click the left mouse button down on an item in the mailbox it will select all messages that have the same value as the item clicked on, and all of those selected messages will be grouped together. For example, Alt/option-clicking on the name of a sender of a message will select all of the messages in that mailbox sent by that person, and move the messages together. Note that the moving of messages in the mailbox list will break the current sort of the mailbox. The Shift key can be used as a modifier to make the selected messages remain in their original positions in the mailbox list, and thus retain the current sort order.
- Importing mailboxes and messages from the original Eudora in to the new Eudora has been substantially improved under Windows. Import times are now 5 times shorter. Basic message attributes and status are now maintained (read/unread, priority, label). Inline images in messages now get moved over.
- Now filters can be imported from original Eudora to the new Eudora. There is not a one-to-one match up of original Eudora's filtering capabilities and those found in Thunderbird, so not all filters will move over exactly. Filters imported that will lose some capabilities will be warned about in a list after the entire filter import process is complete. Also added was the "Stop Filter Execution" action. This is the equivalent to original Eudora's "Skip Rest" action which causes the filtering process to end for messages that match the criteria in the filter with this action.
- Improvements to the importing of original Eudora Windows Address Books have been made.
- Importing on the Mac now looks for a Eudora folder in the user's document folder (i.e. ~/Documents) in addition to the System Folder and the System Documents Folder.
- Added original Eudora-like IMAP auto-expunge behavior. This is controlled by the hidden pref "mail.imap.expunge_option". It can have values for if auto-expunging should occur never (0), always (1), or on a threshold (2). If on a threshold is set, then auto-expunge will occur when there are at least 20 messages waiting to be expunged. The number of messages for that threshold is actually controlled by the hidden pref "mail.imap.expunge_threshold_number".
- Added a "Refresh Folder List" item to the context menu for IMAP folders which gets the current list of folders/mailboxes from the IMAP server and updates the folder tree for that IMAP account.
- Added support for viewing only messages that are not deleted in IMAP mailboxes. Use the "Not Deleted" item in the View->Messages menu or the Mail Views control on the toolbar.
- New mail sound copied from original Eudora.
- Added "Make Address Book Entry" functionality (in Tools menu).
- Added the "SelectedTextURL" feature from original Windows Eudora, which allows selected text to easily be inserted in to a URL and launched. Menu items for them are located in the Tools menu, and they also get keyboard shortcuts associated with them as well. Use the hidden prefs "penelope.selectedTextURL#", where # is an increasing number in sequence.
The online release notes have details about what's new in the beta 9 release. See the Penelope site for more information.
Also See . . .
Can't find what you're looking for? Try a search:
Also, if you have an older Mac, be sure to check out the "Classic" applications page for more options.
Finally, take a look at ALEMIA if you think you know that name of an application, but aren't quite sure.
Related Links
Andrew Starr has a marvelous page of Eudora plug-ins and enhancements that Eudora users must check out. His entire site (known as eMailman) is worthwhile for every email junkie out there.
Graham Orndorff has written a superb collection of articles on setting up email servers and secure email clients on Mac OS X.
Adam Engst has put together a comprehensive overview of email attachment formats that is invaluable for anyone who wants or needs to understand the complexities behind them.
Also Consider . . .
These are applications that are newer and of potential interest, but which I haven't yet selected for permanent inclusion. Have a look, and let me know if you think they deserve to be part of the permanent collection!