Take a Trip Down Memory Lane with Eudora
On the site Tedium, which promises to surface "stories that maybe fell through the cracks of time," editor Ernie Smith writes about Eudora, the much-missed email app of yesteryear. There's nothing new here, of course, since Qualcomm officially discontinued Eudora over a decade ago, but it's still nice to see acknowledgment of how popular and important Eudora was in this "here today, gone tomorrow" Internet era. Our article about converting email away from Eudora is quoted, and Steve Dorner himself even makes a cameo appearance in the comments.
Wow, I remember buying Eudora-J back in the early 90s, when it was basically the only Japanese-capable email client. It was terribly expensive to import. I stuck with Eudora for a long, long time.
But Eudora's not dead yet. I just migrated a friend's Eudora system and all his stored emails, from an old WinXP system to a new Win10 system. Runs just fine. I probably would not have been able to move it so easily if he hadn't made a configuration error and stored all his email files in the app directory. Anyway, he loves Eudora and I can't get him to try a newer email client, and why would he? He's perfectly happy with the same old Eudora.
I have a Snow Leopard iMac that I keep running just for Eudora, and its decades history of email (including Adam’s X settings or whatever they were called)
Yes, I had an email-driven autoreply that would send you a full list of all x-eudora-settings. It was great stuff...
I have used your list so often. Eudora was the best!
I've waited I don't know how many system updates to keep using Eudora, until I had to sacrifice it in the end. To me it proves that not all evolution is necessarily progressive. Finding things with Mail is a nightmare.
Is that article about converting away from Eudora still available? I can't find it in the article.
Of course! :-)
http://tidbits.com/article/12382
Thanks. Though what you said about losing the use of Eudora in Lion is out of date. For a time there was a project called Penelope that provided an extension for Thunderbird that enabled Eudora-like features. Sadly that project has been abandoned, but Eudora OSE still runs in the macOS. I'm currently using it in 10.12.6 Sierra. Among other things, Eudora OSE does a better job rendering HTML than Eudora 6, though plain text still works better for special characters. Sooner or later, however, I'm going to have to move to Apple Mail. But old as Eudora is, it still does things that Apple Mail cannot. Of course the reverse is also true. As for Thunderbird, Mozilla has stopped developing it, too, except for security fixes. In any case the Thunderbird interface is barren compared to Eudora with, among other things, large colorful icons in the customizable Toolbar. As far as I'm concerned it's still the best toolbar in any e-mail client. Even though it's an antique, for some reason no one has improved on it, least of all Apple—or Mozilla.
The main reason I'll be migrating to Apple Mail rather than some other client-side e-mail app is continuity. We can expect that Mail will be supported as long as Apple keeps making Macs—and iPhones. There can be no comparable expectation with any third-party app. Indeed, Eudora and Thunderbird are not the only e-mail projects that have fallen by the wayside. This is probably because most people are using web mail and don't even know there are client-side programs that do a much better job.
The article discusses problems converting Eudora to Thunderbird, but when I started using Thunderbird with the Penelope extension it had no trouble migrating my mail behind the scenes. At first I didn't even realize Thunderbird had relocated the mailboxes. In the meantime I had no trouble exporting the Eudora contacts list and importing it into Apple Mail, though I did get some duplicates. I figured I'd sort them out later.