Eudora E-mail vs Apple Mail
First, let me say, it is the small things in life. I finally, after two years of not using one of my email accounts, fixed it so I could use it. Since I was using Eudora on my trusty Green and White Mac, I thought it’d work great on my Mac Mini as well. Not so.
My Eudora mail was moved over to my Mini without much incidence. However, Eudora 6.2.3 refused to score my mail for junk. I went back and forth with tech support trying everything from changing some preferences to a complete reinstall, but could not get the issue resolved. Finally, I called Eudora’s customer service department to get a refund. I was sad because when Eudora does work, it is extremely powerful and easy to use. And, Eudora’s tech support department was wonderful to work with. When they said they’d call back, they actually did. Same day. And I wasn’t talking to someone in India. Even better. Eudora handed my issue over to their programers to try to figure out why the junk scorer wasn’t working. In the meantime, however, I have changed everything over to Apple Mail.
I decided to use Apple Mail because it was already installed on my Mac, and because I really hate using Thunderbird. While Thunderbird is a powerful program, I am always finding something with it I can’t do. Like auto replies. Also, I think the menuing system on Thunderbird was put together by someone with schizophrenia; I am always *always* hunting the menus to find things. Thunderbird was simply a frustrating experience for me.
The one disadvantage to Apple Mail is there is not a built in wizard to import Eudora mail over to Apple Mail. So I hunted around and found an easy to use and FREE application called Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a simple drag’n'drop application which provides easy one-step migration from Eudora to other mail clients, importing Eudora’s mailboxes, filters, and nickname files. It made moving to Apple Mail a breeze, and I honestly think that every Mac should come with this nifty little application as part of Mac OS. It imported my mail into Apple Mail and all of my addresses into my Mac Address Book. Without Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, there’d be no way I could have moved my mail over to Apple Mail. Eudora just doesn’t play nicely with other applications.
So far, I love Apple Mail. Its spam filtering is excellent, and the menu system is simple and intuitive. It even has the Eudora “personalities” feature built in: if you have several different mail accounts, the “from” is automatically sent with whatever email address that is associated with that account. This is handy when you have several different web sites and want the email address to sync with the web site’s domain name. Honestly, I think I will be hard pressed to move back to Eudora. Even if their tech department is in the US.