Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / October 2005

That of course is for you to decide. I switched some time ago and
haven't regretted it yet, but I can see good resons for staying on, too.

My main advice if you do switch is to gather mail into larger mailboxes
after the switch. I tended to have lots of small dedicated mailboxes in
Eudora, and Mail works better with fewer and larger.

For me the main argument was the somewhat intangible one of wanting to
be rid of a feeling of working against the System's way of doing things
all the time. Mail.app is there, it is free, it has no adware (you can
pay to get rid of it of course) and is upgraded automatically every time
I upgrade the System. And it does have a nicer, more modern interface
IMHO.

What I miss most are boolean search strings and the more sophisticated
search and filters generally in Eudora, although Spotlight lessens the
need a lot.

If you use Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (sse Versiontracker for the latest
version) Eudora's mail will convert to Mail.app very nicely, including
flags, read/unread, etc. I had no problems with that. And it does a
copy, so you have backup all the way.

Only you can decide that.

No.

There's no reason at all to switch to Mail.

Eudora 6.n (I'm using 6.1.1) will happily use your existing Eudora
Folder- it'll do a bit of internal rearrangement but that's not serious.

I was using 3.1.3 Light, with multiple settings files instead of
Personalities, and I changed to 6.1.1 in Light mode (free). It's
absolutely great. And from all reports it handles large volumes of email
much better and more reliably than Mail.app.

Filters work perfectly; so do the plugins The only loss is a spell
checker (who needs one?) and a spam trapper. But my ISP and my filters
do that between them.

Don't switch. Just go on working productively.

I've been with Eudora on and off since 3.1.3 back in about 1997. Since
then I've also tried Claris Emailed (1 and 2), Outlook Express, Mozilla,
Thunderbird and of course Mail (and even Cyberdog for a short time)

Looking back back I still think Claris Emailer was one of the best. I
find that Mail and Eudora suit different needs, and maybe aren't
entirely directly comparable.

Better comparisons with Mail would be such apps as GyazMail. I have used
Mail since OS 10.1 and have never suffered any problems at all. I only
have limited needs for searching (I tend to organise things so that a
search is almost unnecessary), and basic needs for filtering. Both Mail
and Eudora exceed my requirements there.

The main thing that Eudora fails on for me is the poor HTML support,
which I do use - only for incoming messages, that *I* choose to receive,
from various lists. I also find the price a little hard to justify,
especially when there are so many good freeware mail apps, and some
equally good shareware ones too.

Thunderbird, for example, uses almost the same Unix style mbox format
for the mail files, so is easily sorted if anything should happen (which
I find it does). Indeed, both Mail and the Mozilla clients use standard
mbox format files. Eudora does not, although they are plain text, and
easily recoverable too.

Yes.

No, there is Entourage, but that is expensive.

While testing any Email client, I always set it to leave messages on the
server, you can test as many as you like this way and still keep your
messages intact for download.

Go to www.macorchard.com and try some out.

Overall I now prefer Mail, the migration to Mail is easy, especially if
you use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner already suggested. Migration to
Eudora is not as easy though, from Mail I find it broken in Eudora's own
setup.

Just get the latest version of Eudora. It will happily use your current
mailboxes, addressbook and everything else and if you don't like it you
can still just as easily revert to the older Eudora. You can even use
the same mailboxes, etc. with both version: A Mac OS X native Eudora 6  
and Eudora 3.x in Classic Mode. (Just don't run them at the same time
though! :))

Eudora can run in a free, and "Ads" and a paid mode, so you can just try
it before having to decide whether to pay for it.

Actually, the last time I tested Mail (2003) the freeware convertor for
Eudora managed to do a fine job with my hundreds of megabytes of mail
dating back into the mists of time.

Conversion is not likely to be a problem. Personal adaptation is.

That's a very personal question. Some people spend far more on things I
wouldn't keep as gifts... At this precise moment it is hard to say that
Eudora is worth buying, because it is ominously late for a rumored
reworking that would make it a credible competitor to Mail for people
who are not set in 10+ years of using Eudora. Right now, I'd tell anyone
looking at shelling out to Qualcomm to wait until there's at least a new
beta, because I fear we may be seeing the end of Eudora rather than the
major overhaul it needs.

Thankfully, no. The less Microsoft mail software in existence, the
better. Be glad that the only way to get an MS mailer on a Mac is to pay
real money for it, and save your cash for something more useful, like a
bag of natural fertilizer.