Time to move on - ted.g.burton_dotmac

... to Eudora 7 for MacOS X ... I have used Eudora since the 1980's and have always been in awe of its filtering and search capacity; it has become an information database for me to the point I will send myself an e-mail in order to get it into the database. Nothing else comes close. Eye candy it's not.

Eudora 7 is promised, to the extent any software is actually promised. I understand it will be using Cocoa as the base, with all prior functionality. It will thus get the eye-candy and I hope and pray without loss of functionality. They are clearly taking the time to do it right.

I have looked at version 7 on Windows, and though it's butt-ugly like most of Windows, it has the functionality. I have put my office assistant on Eudora for Windows, as I wean her away from AOL, and Eudora is working well.

Patience is a virtue.

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Monday, August 28 2006 @ 09:00 PM PDT

Time to move on - TriVectus

For the last couple of years, I've been using various other apps, including Mail, to handle my e-mail until Eudora gets a few critical feature upgrades (like WebKit integration) that should come with v7.

Let me just say this: no other client comes close to Eudora in handling high volumes of mail. They may be prettier, and they may be far better at small volumes, but when you hit high volumes, not only can other clients not do the job well, but they can't do it *at all*. I still have Eudora installed for reference to messages in my multi-gigabyte archive that contains millions of messages. With Eudora, I can search those millions of messages in a minute or less (on an old G4), and I can search hundreds of thousands in a handful of seconds. What good is this? Within seconds while talking to a client on the phone, I can pull up a complete thread of messages sent and received years ago and use it as reference in the conversation, making me look like I'm *seriously* organized and on the ball. I can also easily open and toss around mailboxes containing tens of thousands of messages, and I can work with hundreds or thousands of such mailboxes without so much as a hiccup.

Needless to say, I can do none of these things in other clients, which typically start to bog down when you get past 50k or so messages. I once made the mistake of trying to deal with a mere 500k messages in Mail (the Tiger version)--big mistake, and I ended up losing most of them. Now, I keep mailboxes to under 5k messages, but they can still take quite a while to open or search, especially after Mail's been running for a while. (I used to have Eudora running for many months without a restart or hint of slowdown - and that was pre-OS X.) Spotlight is a complete--and painfully slow--joke when it comes to performing searches of a large number of messages, and it simply doesn't do complex searches (like, say, one using multiple regular expressions applied across several distinct message fields). Smart mailboxes? Hey, they're great - so long as you only have a few messages hanging around. Add real volume, and they become worthlessly slow. You know the old joke about going and getting a cup of coffee while waiting for an operation to complete? Well, I've actually done it while waiting for Mail to open a smart mailbox. As a result, I've had to stop using them.

My experience with other clients has been similar. When I e-mail the vendors for help, they just tell me that the program wasn't designed for that volume of mail, that I should archive most of my mail elsewhere and work only with a current subset. That's helpful. Nonetheless, lacking options, this has left me looking at third-party solutions for mail archiving, such as Mail Vault. Unfortunately, even these solutions pale next to Eudora, and in the case of MV, they actually cost more to boot. And remarkably, Eudora does all this using standard, good ol' fashioned mbox files, which are just text files. No proprietary databases, no single-file backup issues, and no trying to use the file system as a database just to support the generic OS search engine (hello, Mail!).

BTW, people often complain about Eudora'a UI. It definitely feels dated in many ways, but its fundamental architecture is a key component of the program's success in dealing with a large volume of mail. Interfaces like Mail's simply don't scale well.

Eudora is one of those programs that really grows on you. Aside from its unique ability to handle vast quantities of e-mail, It's loaded with tiny but significant features, like option-clicking sorting in message windows, that no other client has, and it's configurable in the extreme (beyond the large array of preferences lie hundreds of hidden settings). Yes, becoming a guru takes considerable effort, but it's well worth it if you spend many hours a day in e-mail, as I do.

If v7 is anything close to what Qualcomm is hinting at, if it retains the core competencies of v6, and if they actually ever deliver it, life will be good, indeed. Until then, I continue on in a hobbled state with Mail and gMail as my archive.

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Friday, September 08 2006 @ 02:56 AM PDT