Considering that email is the ubiquitous application on the Internet, you should use the best email program available; otherwise, you will slowly (or quickly, in my case) go stark raving mad. I've looked at many email programs in my time, and although a number of them are becoming more and more impressive, none compete with Steve Dorner's Eudora. Simply put, Eudora does most everything right. Again, I don't want to imply that other programs aren't good, but none I've seen can match the features and capabilities of Eudora.
Steve Dorner first wrote Eudora while working at the University of Illinois. Because of its academic heritage, Eudora was made freely available on the Internet. Because of its clean interface and full feature set, Eudora rapidly became the Internet email application of choice. In July of 1992, Steve left the University of Illinois and went to work for a company called Qualcomm, where he continued to enhance Eudora. Because Steve and Qualcomm wanted to give something back to the educational community and taxpayers who made Eudora possible, and because free software is the best advertising for commercial software, Eudora has remained freeware. Qualcomm also has released a commercial version of Eudora that adds some nice touches and features that are essential for email users like me who get a ton of mail every day.
Note: To answer the question that almost everyone always asks, Steve named his Post Office Protocol program "Eudora," after Eudora Welty, the author of a short story he had read, called "Why I Live at the P.O."
The freeware version will continue to exist and will be developed in conjunction with the commercial version, but it is unlikely to receive many new features, other than those Steve deems necessary for basic email usage. For example, he added support for MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), an Internet standard for transferring non-textual data via email, and support for Apple events, so that Eudora can work more closely with other programs on the Macintosh. In addition, the latest versions of both the freeware and commercial versions now work in Power Mac-native mode, significantly increasing speed.
Note: The version of Eudora 1.5.1 included on the disk is not the Power Mac-native version because it was too large to fit on the disk. You can find it in either of the following:
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/1.5/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
The commercial Eudora 2.1 is extremely similar to the freeware Eudora 1.5.1. It looks about the same, and for the most part, works the same. Perhaps the most apparent additional feature in Eudora 2.1 is the filtering feature. It lets you annotate the subject of messages, change their priority, or put them in specific mailboxes based on information in the headers or the bodies of the messages. You can have as many filters as you want, and they can apply to incoming, outgoing, or selected messages. In addition, 2.1 also supports spell checking in messages via the Word Services suite of Apple events. You can even buy Eudora along with Spellswell, an Apple event-aware spelling program.
Note: Using Eudora to transfer files in email back and forth between Macs and PCs works well if your recipient either uses PC Eudora or another MIME-compatible mail program. If you're sending the files from the Mac, use AppleDouble encoding. If you're sending from PC Eudora, choose MIME before attaching the file. Both versions of Eudora automatically recognize MIME attachments and decode them automatically upon receipt.
Other useful features that exist only in Eudora 2.1 include uuencode support, automatic opening of attachments encoded in MIME, BinHex, or uuencode, multiple nickname files for organizations, support for System 7 drag and drop for attaching files to outgoing messages, stationery for frequently sent messages, menu-sharing for Frontier users, and multiple signatures. In my opinion, if you use Eudora heavily, as I do, Eudora 2.1 offers an extremely attractive set of features above and beyond the basic set in Eudora 1.5.1. For those just starting out, try Eudora 1.5.1 for a while, and if you decide you like it, consider purchasing the full Eudora 2.1 version for $65 (there's a coupon for it hiding somewhere in the back of the book). I can't recommend the commercial version of Eudora highly enough. And frankly, I encourage people to buy it, sending the message to Qualcomm that the community appreciates free software and is willing to support commercial versions to keep free versions available. However, for the following discussion, I'll concentrate primarily on 1.5.1 because that's the version on the disk.
Although powerful and flexible, Eudora has a surprisingly simple setup. First, from the Special menu, choose Settings (see figure 21.1).
Figure 21.1: Eudora Settings dialog.
The scrolling list on the left-hand side of the dialog provides access to a large number of Eudora's settings. Optional plug-ins available on various FTP sites can add even more options (see the following for some pointers). Despite all the available fields, only the two in the Getting Started panel are absolutely necessary (although some Internet providers may require some additional settings). The POP Account field holds the full address of your POP account. The best source to find out what to put here is your system administrator. The next field, Real Name, should be obvious. Lastly, click the MacTCP button located below the Real Name field.
For most people, that's all there is to the setup process. If you want to enter a different return address from the address of your POP account (my return address is ace@tidbits.com, whereas my POP account is ace@king.tidbits.com), click the second icon in the list, Personal Information, to bring up that panel.
Note: If you fill in the Return Address field, be very careful to get it right; otherwise, all your incoming email will go to an incorrect address and you'll never know it. Many people mess up their configurations by slavishly copying the screenshots in this book -- I know because I get replies to their messages since they use my return address!
If you need to tell Eudora that your SMTP server is on a different machine from your POP account (it usually isn't), click the third icon in the list, Hosts, to bring up the Host Settings panel. Once you've entered the names of your various servers as given to you by your Internet provider, scroll down to see the icons that enable you to modify how Eudora works, such as Checking Mail, Sending Mail, Attachments, and Fonts & Display (see figure 21.2).
Figure 21.2: More Eudora Settings.
These options enable you to configure Eudora quickly and easily in order to handle many different situations. When I'm traveling and connecting via a modem, I generally don't want to receive large messages, so I turn on the "Skip big messages" checkbox. I also sometimes use the "Leave mail on server" option to ensure that if something happened to my PowerBook while I was traveling, I wouldn't lose any of the mail I'd received while away. I seldom have Eudora check mail regularly, but that's because I get so much that it would be a constant distraction -- however, many people appreciate knowing when new mail has arrived.
Eudora has so many settings that I don't want to get into showing them all to you, and its balloon help is among the best I've used. However, the other important options that I always use are in the Sending Mail panel: Send on check, Word wrap, Fix curly quotes, Keep copies of outgoing mail, and Use signature. In the Attachments panel, stick with BinHex encoding for most files you send to other Mac users and you'll be fine. Use AppleDouble for files you send to PC users whose email programs support MIME (especially PC Eudora). In the Replying panel, I recommend that you use the Reply to all when Option key is down setting, rather than Reply to all by default. The problem is that it's not difficult to send something personal to a mailing list or to unintended recipients if you normally use Reply to all.
Note: One trick (that's not an option) is that if you select text in the message you're replying to and then hold down Shift while you choose Reply (or press [Command]-Shift-R), Eudora quotes only the selected text in the reply.
When you've finished browsing through all of Eudora's many settings and have configured the program to your tastes, click the OK button to save your changes. Eudora stores all of its settings in the Eudora Settings file that it creates in the Eudora Folder in your System Folder (or in the settings file that you used to open Eudora, if you've created more than one settings file).
Note: I alluded to creating more than one Eudora Settings file. You can do this by making a copy of the Eudora Settings file in your System Folder, renaming it, and double-clicking it to launch Eudora. Then, any changes you make to the settings apply only to that Eudora Settings file. It's a good way to easily check two email accounts. Also, if you put a copy of the Eudora Settings file in a new folder and double-click it to launch Eudora, Eudora creates a new set of mailboxes for you. This can be handy if two people share the same Mac but have different email accounts and want to keep their email separate.
Commands for accessing three of Eudora's features -- Mailboxes, Nicknames, and Signature -- live in the Windows menu. The Mailboxes window enables you to create, rename, move, and maintain your mailboxes (remember that you can have hierarchical mailboxes for organizing the email you receive -- the mailboxes in figure 21.3 with triangles to the right of their names are hierarchical). The Nickname window enables you to create, modify, and remove nicknames, which enable you to avoid memorizing email addresses. Clicking just to the left of the name adds or removes a bullet; this means the name will appear as a recipient in Eudora's hierarchical New Message To, Reply To, Forward To, and Redirect To menus. You can put multiple addresses in a single nickname to create a small distribution list. Finally, Eudora's Signature window is a simple text window in which you can enter a signature to be appended to all of your outgoing messages.
Figure 21.3: Eudora Mailboxes, Nicknames, and Signature windows.
You're most likely to use Eudora for simple tasks such as creating new messages, reading incoming mail, replying to messages, and the like. Creating a message is the first thing to do. From the Message menu, choose New Message, or -- to use the shortcut -- press [Command]-N (see figure 21.4).
Figure 21.4: Eudora New Mail window.
Eudora opens a new window with three parts. At the top of the window is a row of switch icons, so that you can toggle items such as signatures on a per message basis (point at them all with balloon help turned on to see what the icons mean). Below that is an area for the header. At the bottom of the window is the message area. Tabbing takes you from one header item to another, and finally to the message window.
You can select email addresses in messages or headers and add them to a Recipients menu (Add as Recipient from the Special menu). The people you add as recipients show up in a hierarchical New Message To menu under the Message menu. If you select someone from that hierarchical menu, Eudora opens a new message with the To line already filled in (the From line is always filled in for you). When you create nicknames for people (Nicknames from the Special menu), you're given the option to add that nickname to the recipient list for quick access.
Eudora has a good text entry environment and wraps paragraphs as you write and edit (which is not true of all email programs, so don't laugh). In fact, Eudora can do some neat things with text, as shown by the commands in the Edit menu (see figure 21.5).
Figure 21.5: Eudora Edit menu.
I especially like the capability to Insert Recipient and Paste as Quotation. I often want to send an email address to a friend for which I have a recipient defined; it's nice to be able to just Insert Recipient in the text where I'm typing. Paste as Quotation also is useful when you're pulling several messages together in one reply.
The only major fault of Eudora's text entry environment is that it doesn't accept more than approximately 32K of text; if you want to send a message longer than that, you must attach a text file to the email message. This limitation will disappear in future versions of Eudora, although perhaps only in the commercial version.
In any event, back at the New Mail window, clicking on the Queue button queues the message for delivery (this is because I didn't select the Immediate Send checkbox when configuring Eudora's Sending Mail panel). If you work on a network that's constantly connected to the Internet, you may want to send all of your mail immediately, at which point that Queue button changes to Send. Even with my direct connection, I stick to queuing messages. It's simply less distracting, and I can always send messages manually if I want.
With the Send on Check switch turned on, I go to the File menu and choose Check Mail. Eudora connects to my POP server to receive any waiting mail; it then connects to my SMTP server to send my queued mail.
Note: If Eudora is interrupted while receiving mail, it can sometimes leave your POP mailbox in a locked state, preventing you from receiving any more mail until it's unlocked. You can fix this by telnetting to your account and killing a specific process, which sounds bad, but it is quite easy. It's explained well in the Eudora Q&A stack, available in the URL below. If you use Northwest Nexus, you can telnet to your account and at the Unix command line, type pop-lock to solve this problem.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
If you only want to send mail, choose Send Queued Messages, also from the File menu. At this point Eudora only connects to the SMTP server to send messages and ignores any messages that might be waiting to come in.
If the In mailbox isn't open already (another preferences switch makes it open when new mail arrives), open it from the Mailbox menu by choosing In (see figure 21.6).
Figure 21.6: Eudora In mailbox.
Eudora's mailboxes, which all look the same, provide a clean display of your mail. A status and priority column at the left edge of the window displays various characters to indicate which messages you haven't read, which you have replied to, which you've forwarded, redirected, and, in your Out mailbox, which have been sent. Some programs mark deleted messages in this way too, but Eudora instead copies deleted messages to a Trash mailbox available in the Mailbox menu. The commercial version of Eudora adds a column for label and uses the Finder labels (use the Labels control panel to change the colors and names) to mark messages.
The next column is the name of the sender, followed by the time and date, size of the message in kilobytes, and subject of the message. In the lower left corner of the window is an indicator that shows the number of messages in the mailbox, amount of disk space that it takes up, and amount of space that is wasted. You can recover the wasted space by choosing Compact Mailboxes from the Special menu, although Eudora also does it automatically after the ratio of wasted space to space on disk gets too high.
Double-clicking on any message opens the message window (see figure 21.7 for an example).
Figure 21.7: Eudora Message window.
The Eudora Message window shows the Subject at the top and a Priority pop-up menu that you can use to mark messages for your own reference, which is a good way to sort them. You can select, copy, and find text in the window, but you cannot change it. Again, my only complaint about the way Eudora handles incoming messages is that it cannot display more than approximately 32K of text in a window, so it chops longer messages into two or more pieces, which can be irritating.
Note: Like many other settings in Eudora, you can modify the size at which Eudora splits messages with a plug-in. I've created a plug-in specifically so issues of TidBITS aren't split -- to receive a copy automatically in email, send a message to .
Luckily, Eudora can save multiple selected messages to a single file, removing the header information in the process so that there's no header garbage in the middle of the file. Simply select all the messages you want concatenated into a single file. Choose Save As from the File menu, making sure that the Include Headers and Guess Paragraphs (which wraps lines in paragraphs) checkboxes aren't selected if you want the file exactly as it was sent to you.
With a message open, you can use the items in the Message menu to Reply, Forward, Redirect, or Delete the current message. Most of those functions are self-explanatory, but Redirect is an interesting and useful command. When you forward a message to someone else via Eudora, your address becomes the Reply-To address. However, if you want the original sender's address to remain as the Reply-To address, you use Redirect. That way, when the person you're redirecting to receives the message and replies, the reply goes to the original sender, not back to you. Eudora adds a tag that indicates that you redirected the message to the header of the redirected message so the recipient can see what's happened.
Once you're done reading a message, you generally want to either delete it or file it. Eudora makes deleting messages easy (the Delete key, [Command]-D, or the Delete option in the Message menu) because it merely moves them to the Trash mailbox, from which you can recover them later, if necessary. I leave a lot of mail, sometimes up to 4,000 messages, in my Trash so I can easily go back and retrieve something afterwards. When I want to really delete messages from the Trash to recover some space, I sort by date, select the first half of the messages, and press the Delete key. Since the messages are already in the Trash, Eudora deletes them right away, and if I've deleted enough messages to create a sufficient amount of wasted space in the Trash, Eudora compacts it to recover the space. You can set Eudora to empty the Trash every time you quit if you're not as retentive about old email as I am.
Filing messages in one of an arbitrary (or at least large) number of hierarchical mailboxes is also easy. With the message or messages selected, select the destination mailbox from the Transfer menu. I save a lot of messages for future reference, so I appreciate the ease of filing messages.
Eudora's clever touches abound. If you choose About Eudora from the Apple menu, Eudora tells you the minimum amount of memory it should have. Should your In, Out, and Trash mailboxes fill up to the point where Eudora needs more memory, it's good about warning you ahead of time and suggesting a size that will support the new requirements. That's usually my warning to delete messages from the Trash.
Although Apple's Balloon Help is becoming increasingly common, many people never think to use it in current programs because it's so slow. I strongly recommend that you turn it on while exploring Eudora, though, because Steve has written excellent help balloons that seem to explain every nook and cranny of the program.
Steve must have had fun writing Eudora's dialog boxes. Many of them are, shall I say, less than serious. For instance, I started typing with a mailbox window open in Eudora (I'd forgotten that I hadn't switched over to Nisus Writer on my second monitor), and Eudora beeped at me a couple of times and then opened a dialog saying, "Unfortunately, no one is listening to keystrokes at the moment. You may as well stop typing." I far prefer such human touches like this to dialogs that say, "Text entry not allowed," or some such terse phrase.
Eudora can sort mailboxes on status, priority (which you generally set), sender, date, and subject. This is a helpful feature for anyone who receives a significant amount of email. Eudora 2.1 makes sorting even easier than in 1.5.1 (in which you must use a menu) by letting you click on the column titles to sort. I find that I use this feature surprisingly often.
Eudora supports a number of Apple events, and many people have used Frontier and AppleScript to add functionality to Eudora through scripting. You can peruse some of those scripts in:
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/scripts/
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
If you create multiple settings files, different people can use the same copy of Eudora to send and receive their personal email. This setup is handy if a number of people all share the same computer but don't want to share the same email account ("Hey, no poking about in my email!"). I use this feature as well, because I have multiple accounts, but I want all my email to end up in the same In mailbox. Eudora's capability to launch using different settings files is also the secret to how it's used in large universities. Students are given a POP account and a Eudora Settings file that's configured for them on a floppy disk. Whenever they use a public Mac hooked to the campus network, they double-click on their Eudora Settings file, which launches a copy of Eudora over the network (saving the space on the floppy disk). All of their mail comes down to the floppy disk, which they can then read on any other Mac that has Eudora on it.
Finally, although official technical support only comes with Eudora 2.1, expert Eudora users provide extremely good support online in the newsgroup comp.sys.mac.comm. Also, Qualcomm runs a mailing list specifically for Eudora users -- to subscribe, send email to majordomo@qualcomm.com with subscribe mac-eudora-forum in the body of the message. Make sure that your return address is correct -- it is the address that will be added to the mailing list. If you have a simple question, ask there before anywhere else (but use the balloon help and the manual before that). Eudora's manual is also excellent. Look for it in:
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/documentation/
Although perhaps not perfect, you must have Eudora. That's why I've included it on the disk. Other than the 32K limitation on message size, I'd like to see more powerful searching capabilities. However, any such quibbles are easily outweighed by Eudora's significant capabilities, such as the capability to queue up mail and send it all at once, essential for anyone using SLIP or PPP. Eudora simply is the way to go for MacTCP-based email.
Eudora 1.5.1 is free, and comes courtesy of the University of Illinois and Qualcomm. You can retrieve the latest versions from:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/mail/
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/mac/eudora/1.5/
Eudora 2.1 costs $65 for an individual copy, or $99 for Eudora 2.1 and Spellswell. Prices drop quickly from there, depending on how many copies you want to buy, so if you're outfitting a couple of people in an office, check with Qualcomm for the exact discounts. You can get more information from Qualcomm via email at eudora-sales@qualcomm.com, or by phone at 800-2-EUDORA.