Goodbye Eudora
Monday, April 16th, 2007 @ 7:00pm. Category: General.Really, I loved The Bat! It did everything I needed it to and more, plus it was easy to use. Unfortunately, it wasn’t free after 30 days and I had no means to pay for it back when I first used it.
Pegasus was next. It did everything I wanted, even if I had to do it clumsily. It was always fast, free, and had a thriving newsgroup. Development began to stagnate, and alas, XP SP2 killed it. Versions eventually came out to fix compatibility issues, but by then it had lost its magic.
Thunderbird I tried but detested for being too much of an Outlook clone. I use Outlook at work and find it extremely annoying to do anything useful. Also, I’m a big fan of mdi, which neither of these had.
Eudora was good enough. I could have Eudora for free if I didn’t mind the ads displayed in-client, and they were small enough that I didn’t. The forums were decent, and it had mdi. It did most of what I wanted to without much hassle. Later versions introduced bugs, and eventually it was announced that Eudora-as-it-was would be scrapped to become Eudora-as-Thunderbird. The ads stopped, and things were pleasant enough. I trudged along with a slightly bloated mail client answering my 3 pop e-mail accounts.
Then the spam started. My school account was the worst. I had used Popfile with great success in the past, but I wanted a more hands-free solution this time around. Eudora’s spam filtering was not what I would call useful, either.
Then I remembered that Gmail could fetch pop e-mail for me. I could get rid of Eudora, let Gmail handle the spam, and still have a one-stop access to 80% of my mail.
I switched everything over and have been happy since. I have just closed Eudora for what is probably the last time. Fare thee well, Eudora.
I am sure there’s going to be a downside to this (what if Gmail goes down!?) but for now I am enjoying the slightly less cluttered task bar.
Follow any responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can post a comment.
Jason Clark | 16-Apr-07 at 7:43 pm | Permalink
How do you like using gmail with your pop account? Can you send email from gmail using the same email address as the pop account (via smtp, I’d guess)?
I use my jclark.org email address for all my personal email, and a separate comcast.net account anywhere I use a credit card. I access both via pop now using Apple Mail, but it’s slow and tied to my desktop iMac. I’ve considered the switch to IMAP, but it seems like a pain, and I’m not sure that I could have a single web access point to both accounts. If I used gmail with pop for both accounts, all my mail would be in one place. As long as I could still send mail from the non-gmail addresses, that would probably do everything I need.
effika | 16-Apr-07 at 8:47 pm | Permalink
Gmail fetches the mail and automatically labels it for you (if you want it to) with what account it came from. I can send e-mail as that address, too. You could even do that w/o setting up Gmail to fetch mail from that address— it has a verification system in place to make sure you own that address. It’s also got some interesting features (like the ability to archive immediately all mail received to an address) as well as standard ones (leave mail on the server, ect).
I really like Gmail’s interface (and the list of annoyances/things I can’t do is shrinking) so this has been a good switch for me.
Jason Clark | 16-Apr-07 at 9:03 pm | Permalink
Excellent- thanks for the info. It’s been ages since I logged into my gmail account. I think I’ll be checking it out again soon. My wife and several of my friends use it… I like the features and interface, but couldn’t part with my existing addresses. I’d heard they added pop support, but hadn’t checked it out.
Mephator | 16-Apr-07 at 9:42 pm | Permalink
I’ve been accessing Gmail accounts via Outlook for a couple years now, sending and receiving and everything I ever wanted to.
Couldn’t be happier with the service.
Derek Hubbard | 16-Apr-07 at 9:53 pm | Permalink
I, personally, really like Thunderbird. Just throwing my opinion into the ring. :)
effika | 16-Apr-07 at 10:07 pm | Permalink
Mephator:
via Outlook
Dude, seriously. :-P
Derek Hubbard:
Thunderbird
Thunderbird was nice for what it was, just wasn’t my cup of tea.
Jason Clark | 17-Apr-07 at 10:09 pm | Permalink
I tried T-Bird back in the 0.3 days, when it couldn’t import from Apple Mail (dear lord, I hope they got that fixed by now). I’ve considered trying the latest, but to be honest, I think Bloglines has spoiled me to the comforts of having my data available from any PC, anywhere. Of course, all of my email accounts, or at least the two I care about, have webmail. What I really want is a unified, available anywhere interface to all my mail.
Now, as I understand these things, the classic way to fix this would be as follows:
On a publicly available server where I can do such things, set up an IMAP server, and use fetchmail or somesuch arcana to gather all my pop mail into this single location. This allows me to use any desktop client that speaks IMAP (pretty much all of them), and most every IMAP server comes with a web interface, or else you slap Squirrelmail or suchlike onto your server.
Well, my website has a great hosting plan at Dreamhost, but I’m not willing to drop the kind of bucks that a dedicated server requires, so I can’t set all of this up there. I could build a mail server at home (which means learning all the crap in the prior paragraph) and making it available via DynDNS or one of that ilk. Oh yeah, and I’d better setup SpamAssassin or something like it if I every want to find the needle in a haystack that is my real, non-spam mail.
Or, I can use gmail to consolidate all my pop accounts in one place, get spam filtering for free, and access it from everywhere on any one of the Internets. I really must set this up and try it soonest.