Eudora History: Email for a Different Era
tedium.co
tedium.co
Because Qualcomm stopped development over a decade ago certain features are problematic these days, certificates updates and the lack of a decent HTML editor for example.
That means that I also have to use Mozilla's Thunderbird for some jobs.
Let me say this categorically: Thunderbird isn't in the race with Eudora. It would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly bad Thunderbird is by comparison. If Thunderbird or any other open source client is ever to catch up with Eudora then a huge amount of work will need to be done.
There is one thing I've never understood about classic well designed software and that is why are supposed clones such as Thunderbird so inferior to the original. One would think Thunderbird's designers would simply copy the Eudora paradigm and correct its out of date features on the way.
Well it's not so with Thunderbird. Perhaps someone knows the reason why.
Anyway, Eudora is on my machine to stay for the time being. It'll be there until the POP/IMAP protocol ceases to work!
I would read that :)
What would I call the best? Try not to laugh, but I liked Outlook Express. OE is one of the few applications I miss from the Windows ecosystem.
I also liked The Bat and the client that came with Opera. I have grown fond of Thunderbird, but I'd not call it the best.
Anyhow, backup and restoration was both possible and pretty easy:
https://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/librarywebsecure/be...
While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.
(For a number of years, I was awarded the Microsoft MVP in Shell/User, IE/OE, and Security categories. The latter only awarded twice as I stopped helping and went back to Linux, sort of returning to my roots which were in Unix.)
Of course I did, how do you think I found them? :-) BTW, I talked to support on the phone about this, they told me that backup/restore was not supported by OE and I was on my own with it.
> While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.
Oh, I eventually did figure out how to back it up and restore it. My point is this is something the application itself should be able to do. It's a fundamental thing it should do.
As for the proprietary binary format, it turns out that Thunderbird said it could import it. I breathed a sigh of relief when it did so successfully. I should not have to rely on 3rd party tools to backup/restore/decode critical data for my business.
With TB there was no longer any reason to put up with that.
BTW, I have files going back 40 years, and email archives going back 25 years. The machines and programs that worked with those files are long gone. I prefer to store things as text files for long term storage, as much as possible, or at least the most common file formats like jpg.
Storing in a binary, proprietary format just isn't acceptable.
P.S. I used a bunch of file compressors back in the DOS days, and before DOS died I uncompressed all of those archives and stored the uncompressed files.
P.P.S. Thanks for taking the time to write out the tips, I hope there are others this can help.
Not mentioned in the article is that Eudora was a multi-window program, modelled after the Macintosh (spatial) Finder, making it easy to see and manage multiple mail folders (typically filter-generated, for mailing lists or important contacts) and messages together. Seemingly every other client imitates Outlook's single peephole view.
* https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/configure-postfix-to-use...
Yeah, Gmail's threading is OK most of the time but try managing a thread where you email a group and get a mix of direct responses and reply-all responses. I inevitably end up missing an important response every time, and it's a real pain in the ass to go back and find one particular response.
My #1 dislike with TB is there is no backup/restore method. There is export/import for the address book, but not for the entire database. Instead it stores things in randomly named directories - madness.
Personally I've come to the conclusion that the worst thing we ever did was to allow HTML to become common place in email. That, and top posting.
I see no immediate solution to the HTML problem. The fact is that producing a good HTML editor turns out to be extremely difficult, so invariably the implementations in email clients are generally only poor subsets of the spec, moreover, no two HTML editors produce anything like similar code/output for any given tag, etc.
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/
It was the one I used the most as it was the first that really permitted me to save every email from 1996 through to around 2007 when I finally migrated all of my email onto Gmail (I'd kept a Windows machine around solely to use The Bat! and decided to go all-in on webmail once Gmail was capable enough).
Simple for PGP, complex filtering, fast search over tens of thousands of emails, fast retrieval, great UI. It was great.
How comes email managed to federate multiple incompatible systems (MCI,MS Mail,X.400,etc.) into an open RFC standard, where other protocols (instant messaging in particular) failed?
Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
(until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
(Am I seeing a pattern here?)
The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
IM has a longer history than you might think. You could send instant messages to people on your network, long before there was anything commercial about it.
IM functions have existed on systems for a very long time. Some of them even had groups and various permissions associated with that. On top of that, there were overall user permissions with varied levels. They could send messages to other people in their same usergroups. An example would be /wallops or /globops, and similar commands. You still see that functionality built into things like IRC servers and some clients. There was also a /msg{user} command. There were also messages sent to the operator on duty, and things like that.
So, this doesn't detract from your overall point. I just figured you should know that IM wasn't created as a business, so much as it was a way to communicate with other people. It would be many years before people sought a profit in it, the monitorization of it was a bit later than that. The first monetization efforts, that I remember, were in selling products (and services) that made it easier on internal networks. For a while, Novell was pretty big in that space, but they weren't the first.
IM has quite a history. Someone should write a book on it.
I'm not sure of the absolute beginnings, but there has probably been IM since they first networked two computers together. It was probably the second thing they wrote and the first message was probably a fart joke.
You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)
Seeing the picture of that box brought back memories (such as when software came in boxes!)
"Power user" would be the last term I'd use to describe Eudora users in the mid-2000s at the university where I did tech support. They were generally emeritus professors who had to be instructed whether each click was a left-click or a right-click.
Supporting Eudora was such an absolute nightmare that we had a help desk party when official campus support was terminated. It was an unstable, opaque mess of an email client compared to its 21st century contemporaries.
Every new email client seems to be more interested in re-inventing email that providing a simple straight forward client for "old school" usage.
Currently I use Apples email client, not that I absolutely love it or don't think it could be better, it's just the least no nonsense client currently available.
Thunderbird fails to deliver, for me at least, the same feeling of a well designed powerful application that Firefox does in the browser space.
When you had new mail, a dialog popped up with a picture of a rooster holding a letter in its beak. If you checked your mail and didn't have any, the dialog would show a picture of a snake. After searching the internet for screenshots of these for years, I finally found them! http://old.accesscom.com/support/macintosh/mac-eudora2.html
Hey! Some of us are still using Sylpheed! :)