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I finally gave up on keeping Eudora working a few years ago, but I still haven't found anything nearly as good. I think the 2 best features were: -Performance. It was fast as hell even on old equipment, downright instantaneous on modern hardware. Everything was fast, sorting vast amounts of email, searching, you name it. -Alt-click to bring related emails together. Meet to see all emails from one particular person? Alt-click on their name/address in the email list. Want to instead see all emails with a certain subject? Alt-click on the subject. Faster and less error prone than typing.

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.

I switched to Thunderbird because it stores the emails in a plain text file. This gives me access to the email archive even if the TB executable is no longer available.

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.

I'm genuinely curious to read that book. I used pine until about 2004 before I lost access to it and migrated to webmail more or less permanently. Perhaps my email usage is plain compared to yours? I still fire up Thunderbird to archive my mail, but that's it. I still pine for pine sometimes (I couldn't resist), but I have to imagine some of that is rose colored glasses.

you can always setup gmail as a relay [1] and do your gmail with alpine, i do this whenever i miss pine.

* https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/configure-postfix-to-use...

I started using Pine at university, and still do. Trying out Mutt has been on my to-do list for almost twenty years now.

I started using it when I was in school (probably around 7th grade) and we were given shell accounts on a server somewhere. I used it that way until I left university in 2004. After that I needed to set up a new email account and started using webmail. I also wasn't regularly telneting into a shell so didn't really have access. The things that made it really good: threading, keywords (basically tags), and keyboard navigation were done pretty well in gmail. It also had good filtering. But I feel like I need support for images and HTML, even if I hate those things in email.

Eudora is a major reason my home desktop is still on OS X 10.6.

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.

I have used Eudora and don't think it was the best. I would include it in the top ten, but not call it the best.

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.

Pegasus Mail!

There is no way to back up OE mail. It stores email in hidden directories in an undocumented binary format. I abandoned it for that reason.

It's remarkable that you didn't just tick the box to show hidden files and directories, along with unticking the box to hide extensions on known file types. Back when I used Windows, those were the first settings I changed. (There was one more in that same section, but I've forgotten it.)

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.)

> It's remarkable that you didn't just tick the box to show hidden files and directories

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.

> It would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly bad Thunderbird is by comparison.

I would read that :)

> and the lack of a decent HTML editor

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.

Despite my comments re HTML I solidly agree with you, HTML in emails is mostly a damn nuisance. Unfortunately, everyone expects pretty formatting these days, and it seems HTML is the default.

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.

i had used Eudora, The Bat!, Balsa, Thunderbird and probably some more i have forgotten about since then. mutt has left all of them in the dust, Eudora included.