Finding Messages in Eudora for Mac OS X

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Max - 25 Dec 2003 00:19 GMT

Greetings and Merry Christmas!

I currently use Eudora 5.x under Windows 2000 running on Pentium II
400 MHz (I know, that's why I need to buy a new machine). I am
thinking about switching to Mac, but before I buy a new Macintosh for
$3K+, I would like to find out more about Eudora performance under OS
X on Power Mac G5 1.6 GHz, or dual processor system.

My problem with Eudora for Windows is twofold: First, when I search my
database of emails, it takes Eudora over 40 seconds to complete the
search. Second, when Eudora is checking for new email, it is
impossible to type anything. The processor is used 100% by Eudora
during that time. I need to wait until all new messages load before I
can resume typing my email.

I should also mention that I currently have 6 mailboxes I run searches
on, each of these mailboxes has 18,000+ messages. Also, I do
"Anywhere" search, which means I search headers as well as body of the
mesasges. So, I expect the search to take a while, but with growing
database of emails, each week it is taking a bit longer than the week
before.

So, my question is: does anyone have Eudora with about 120,000
messages stored on 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5? That probably sounded like a
dumb question, but I am really interested only in real-life test
results, not in what-if [I had 120,000 messages in Eudora] scenarios.
If so, how long does it take you to search through these messages
doing "Anywhere" search until the search results are displayed in
"Find Messages" window?

Also, if someone has Dual 1.8 or 2.0 GHz machine with that many
messages in Eudora, how long does it take your machine until search
results are displayed?

Finaly, is Eudora for Mac OS X better with checking email and alowing
to continue typing emails at the same time than my Eudora for Windows?
Or do you still have to pause and wait for the new messages to be
downloaded before resuming typing your email? Does the 2nd processor
in Dual processor systems make any difference?

Before I buy a Mac, I need to have an idea of how fast I will be able
to find messages. I spend about 5 hours daily replying to emails and
I probably do 50 to 80 searches. I appreciate all your help.

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Sander Tekelenburg - 25 Dec 2003 02:59 GMT

[...]

> So, my question is: does anyone have Eudora with about 120,000
> messages stored on 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5?

FWIW, I have about 60.000 messages spread out over about 115 mailboxes.
On a G4/400 (a 4 year old model) an "Anyhwere" search through all
mailboxes takes about 30 seconds.

2 ways to make it faster:
- search through only specific mailboxes
- move all that mail together in far fewer mailboxes.

That last one you've essentially done already, with just 6 mailboxes.
Based on prior experience with moving mail together into fewer
mailboxes, I'd expect that on my machine, converting my 115 mailboxes
into 6 would make the same type of search at least 50% faster: down from
30 to 20 seconds.

Assuming G5s are about twice as fast as G4s, that would bring it down to
10 seconds.

Add the MHz factor, the slowest G5 (1.6MHz) would be 4 times faster than
my G4/400, so that ought to bring search time down to 2.5 seconds.

Add disappointment factor ;) and it might in reality take 5 to 10
seconds?

> [...] I am really interested only in real-life test
> results, not in what-if [I had 120,000 messages in Eudora] scenarios.

Buy me a G5 and I'll post real life results ;)

[..]

> Also, if someone has Dual 1.8 or 2.0 GHz machine with that many
> messages in Eudora, how long does it take your machine until search
> results are displayed?

I seriously doubt a dual would make a big difference, unless you're
running many processor intensive other apps at the same time. (If you
do, it _would_ make a big difference. The OS will spread the load over
both processors.)

> Finaly, is Eudora for Mac OS X better with checking email and alowing
> to continue typing emails at the same time than my Eudora for Windows?

Eudora happily let's me type while it is fetching/sending mail. (Yes,
there have been some issues reported (also by me) with problems in this
area, but those were bugs and they're fixed in Eudora 6.) AFAIK this
always worked just fine even on much slower machines, years ago. If it
doesn't for you, perhaps it is an OS thing?

HTH

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Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

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Max - 25 Dec 2003 21:50 GMT

> Add disappointment factor ;) and it might in reality take 5 to 10
> seconds?

Well, being a longtime Windows user, I got used to BIG disappointement
factors :( That's why I am trying to find out the exact time the
search will take, because I do so much of them every day. But thank
you for this estimate, it gives me a ballpark figure to work with.

> Eudora happily let's me type while it is fetching/sending mail. (Yes,
> there have been some issues reported (also by me) with problems in this
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
>
> HTH

I use Eudora 6.0.x, not 5.x as I reported before (I forgot abot the
recent upgrade). I also forgot to mention I also use Spamnix as a
plug-in. It adds to processor load while Eudora is fetching mail.
While you may be able to continue working with Eudora if you do not
use this plug-in, you may find that once you install Spamnix, you will
be locked out for few seconds while email fetching/filtering is taking
place. Again, it would be the best to hear from someone who has
Spamnix installed....

Regarding the OS thing - I've never been a fan of Windows. I have
been frustrated by what I think is poor memory management in Windows
and the slowing down of the operating system if you run it for a week
or more without rebooting. Again, i think this is caused by the
problems with memory management and memory leaks. Not to mention the
ideology of Micorsoft: let's put out the new version instead of fixing
the old bugs, so we can make some money. Man, this idology really
sucks for the consumer and makes me so mad! I use Windows because I
had programs in the past that were not available for Mac. Plus, the
hardware for Windows is cheaper. Right now, all the programs I need
to run are also available for Mac. Plus, I can always run Windows
simulator if I need to use a program which is not wvailable for Mac (I
hope I won't have to). However, I also know SCO and Linux and the
multitasking is a lot better in any flavor of Unix than in any flavor
of Windows.

So basically, I am trying to choose between Mac G5 and Windows now.
Because I do so much searches in Eudora, I still may go with 3 GHz
Pentium4 with 800 MHz frontside bus if it offers substantially faster
searches.... I can get one here with basic 17 inch monitor for about
$1,700 with tax, which still a lot cheaper than $3,300 for the Power
Mac G5 with 20 inch flat screen. However, if 1.6 GHz Mac will offer
about the same speed, then I would very much like to get away from
Windows at this point.

If someone out there can run some quick tests for me on their Eudora
on 1.6 Ghz G5, I would really be interested in the results. Thank you
for the info so far, and have pleasant rest of the holidays.

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r@y - 26 Dec 2003 09:29 GMT

> If someone out there can run some quick tests for me on their Eudora
> on 1.6 Ghz G5, I would really be interested in the results. Thank you
> for the info so far, and have pleasant rest of the holidays.

What will that prove? That a G5 is faster than your old P2?
I think we know that already. And you're probably in the wrong group if
you're asking if a Mac is better than a Windows machine.

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Bill Cole - 26 Dec 2003 18:12 GMT

[...]

> So, my question is: does anyone have Eudora with about 120,000
> messages stored on 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5? That probably sounded like a
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> doing "Anywhere" search until the search results are displayed in
> "Find Messages" window?

FWIW, the message count is not likely to be the best metric for how fast
that search is. Total byte count is more likely to be the controlling
factor. If your mail is about average you have about 250MB of mail that
you are searching there. I have a much larger archive (>1GB) and a much
slower machine (450MHz/G4) and I don't have a really good way to scale
the results, because It looks like somewhere around 1GHz the CPU would
catch up to the disk and disk speed would be the real limiter then, not
cpu. Disk speed shouldn't vary significantly between MacOS and Windows,
and if that archive is about 250MB you should be looking at about a
minute to search it. There may be some impact from other aspects like
RAM and what else you run, since MacOS does a fairly smooth tradeoff of
swapping processes to disk when memory demands are high to using any
free RAM for disk cache when process memory demands are low. As a
result, anything disk-intensive on MacOS will benefit a great deal from
having a lot of memory available.

> Also, if someone has Dual 1.8 or 2.0 GHz machine with that many
> messages in Eudora, how long does it take your machine until search
> results are displayed?

I'm not sure whether Eudora on Windows works the same way, but on the
Mac you get the results progressively as messages are found, so the
answer to that could be 'instantly' or 'never' on any Mac.

> Finaly, is Eudora for Mac OS X better with checking email and alowing
> to continue typing emails at the same time than my Eudora for Windows?

If it is at all bad on Windows, then the answer would have to be YES. I
have a much slower Mac than you are considering and would not notice the
mail check were it not for the progress window popping into the
background.

> Or do you still have to pause and wait for the new messages to be
> downloaded before resuming typing your email? Does the 2nd processor
> in Dual processor systems make any difference?

It appears that Eudora does use multiple threads and creates new ones
when doing a search, so the second processor should be utilized pretty
efficiently.

> Before I buy a Mac, I need to have an idea of how fast I will be able
> to find messages. I spend about 5 hours daily replying to emails and
> I probably do 50 to 80 searches. I appreciate all your help.

Since I do a lot of the same, I have a simple piece of advice no matter
what you end up buying as a new machine: organize your mail and stop
doing global searches. I have 1.1GB of mail in 197 mailboxes scattered
in a directory tree that is 4 layers deep in a few places and has a
total of 25 directories, and as a result I can usually isolate searches
to a tiny fraction of of my total mail archive. I didn't realize that it
took 10 minutes to search the whole thing until today because I never do
it, instead I search subsets like my spam archive (very large...) or my
inbound or outbound mail from certain periods or certain correspondents.

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Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / December 2003

Finding Messages in Eudora for Mac OS X