Changing my Email client

A number of posts favour Eudora and other products over Thunderbird without explaining why.

I use Thunderbird because:

• Works the same on Windows and Linux (I use both O/S)
• Set-up fairly painless, including presets for most email providers.
• Is free and maintained, notably security and privacy fixes
• Supports up-to-date protocols, POP/SMTP, IMAP, HTTP and encryption etc.
• Handles multiple email accounts from different providers
• Has the usual edit, spell-check,contacts. spam, sort, search, ordering and labelling capabilities
• Lots of configuration options if needed
• I don't need the collaborative/team features offered by the likes of Outlook.
• Not found anything I need that Thunderbird doesn't provide.

What does Eudora offer that overcomes it being out of support since 2006? (The 2018 Open Source version released by the Computer History Museum appears to be the 2006 code.)

And opening the field fully, what functions do folk have in their favourite email client that makes it their 'must have' choice?

Dave

Eudora allows redirection as distinct from forwarding.

I have never found any other email client software that allows redirection.

Hmmm,

• I've never wanted to redirect personal email. Businesses often do it, but not me.
• Thunderbird has a redirect plug-in, but it only works when the computer is switched on and Thunderbird is running. Not ideal for redirecting email long-term because the home computer has to be left switched on and unattended. OK up to a point, but a business redirecting email should worry about the reliability.
• Email redirect is best done by the server, not by an on/off client, because the server is always on. Not all ISP's support redirect (all mine have, so it's not uncommon) but if they redirect it's set up by logging into the email account on the server, not from the client. Much more reliable.

Dave

Pegasus Mail has this, assuming by redirect you mean what I think you mean (forward unaltered aka "bounce", so it reaches your chosen recipient pretty much the same - with just an extra line in the headers to document the redirection - as if it had been sent to them by the original sender - thus allowing your recipient to reply by default to the original sender, not to you).

It's still under active development (since 1990!) and has worked brilliantly for me for 20+ years. But it's arguably not as user-friendly as some alternatives (perhaps because it's so feature-rich and configurable), and it's also heavily dependent on the continued health and dedication of just one main developer, so maybe not an obvious first choice. But worth a look, IMO... (and it's free for both private and business use).

Edited By Bikepete on 22/03/2022 15:07:46

Will Pegasus work on an AppleMac running OS 10.6.8 ?

When I worked at the University, I frequently received messages that needed to be answered by another department so I wanted to be able to redirect the message to the Head of the other department, so when he hit "reply", the response went to the enquiring student.

Unfortunately, somebody decided that I had to use "Outlook" ( NOT know as "outHOUSE" without reason) so I received the replies.

One of the consequences was my early retirement, with poor health - but I do NOT, under any circumstances, want to think about that.

MC

Greensand's OP said 'I am thinking about updating my Emailer client from MS Outlook 2007 to something rather more modern.' I take him to mean currently available email clients not golden oldies covering special cases!

Email at work is evil. I remember when I first got over a hundred emails in one day. No idea what the maximum was, I gave up counting. They carried on arriving when I was off sick and on holiday so there was always a giant backlog waiting when I got back. email made people ill.

Dave

It's a Windows only program (XP onwards).

I believe there are various ways to run Windows programs on Mac OS - but I have no direct experience.

Years ago, somebody told me that computers would make my life easier.

He was lying through his teeth!

I waste a lot of time every day checking messages in my JUNK mailbox because one or two important messages trigger the algorithm to label them as junk and I need to see them.

Conversely, the algorithm misses a lot that are Junk.

In my view, people who send junk or "spam" messages should be publicly and ceremonially castrated - you will note from this that I'm a wishy-washy liberal!!

MC

Hi Guys,

I don't have any junk problems ! You should set up black and white lists. Anything not on the white list gets automatically sent to the waste bin. Yes I can check the waste bin, but I no longer bother since I know that it is just junk.

Another vote for not using one at all. I get all my emails routed to my gmail account then just use the online service. Yes emails do get deleted after a while so you have to regard them as volatile. It takes a little while to get used to a different way of working - any information that has to be kept needs to be saved off elsewhere but once you get used to this then it's all good.I pay for 1Tb of Onedrive cloud storage, so any vital emails are downloaded from gmail and stuffed into Onedrive.

As has been said you re not tied to any particular platform or piece of hardware, emails are accessible from ipad, phone, work computer etc etc

I have no wish to access email from anywhere other than my computer in my study.

I save important messages; I have 12Gb of messages saved on my computer.

I have no faith in the security of any messages saved anywhere other than my computer.

Eudora works for me.

I subscribe to the ungrammatical concept "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

MC

I'm all for avoiding unnecessary change too but Greensands is looking for a new email client, not for one that works on Snow Leopard (2006)! At least Thunderbird is up-to-date.

Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of email clients.

Dave

Like I said, much as I like Eudora - especially it's filtering, personalities and stationery capabilities (plus, it must be said: being now unsupported I'm not constantly bombarded with updates/new versions to go through learning curves again) - I wouldn't recommend it for a new user.

There are cracks beginning to show. For example: it cannot properly handle the UTF-8 character set which is becoming ubiquitous (thanks Apple). There is a workaround available (for the Windows version of Eudora) but for me the cure is worse than the disease.

Pandora has a good reputation among its users, many of them ex-Eudora users (Pandora was intended as a Eudora replacement).

I have no experience with modern Thunderbird, as I said. Nor any other client actually except Outlook Express many moons ago when it was foisted on me at the office. I can't believe anyone would want anything that ghastly. Don't know if it - or it's derivative - has improved since. I get the impression it hasn't.