EXCLUSIVES

MAIL PROGRAM

Words by Bill Troop

If you send or receive more than a few emails a week you need email software that can quickly and efficiently send, receive, sort, filter, and protect you from spam and scam. If you need to be able to organize your mail intelligently and search through it rapidly, some products for Mac are slow and unpredictable with heavier use.

The past decade has seen a watershed in the way we communicate with each other. Email has changed us more fundamentally than anything since the invention of writing. Not even the telephone has changed us so much. As we have tried to grow into this new communication paradigm, nothing has helped more than Eudora. From the very beginning of the email revolution, Eudora showed how to manage our email lives and keep our sanity. Eudora is probably now more important to most of us than our word processors.

Apple Mail is a great basic program, but is mainly for people just getting their feet wet with email.

Thunderbird is promising, but needs a lot of work. Like Entourage, it also has a news client, but don’t even think of using it for news if you are going to be looking at heavy newsgroups, especially those with binaries. It crashes on large newsgroups. (Panic Inc.’s Unison is the newsreader of choice on Mac — nothing comes close to the efficiency and elegance of this program.) Entourage’s best point is its project integration with Microsoft Office. However, project integration is not cross platform compatible, a substantial disadvantage. And Entourage has the same insurmountable problem that Outlook and most other MS apps have: a huge, unitary file structure that is overly complex, needlessly slow and vulnerable to corruption. By contrast, each Eudora mailbox is a separate ASCII file that can be read if necessary in any text editing program, and attachments are always stored separately. This is the way it should be. This is sound programming practice.
When Eudora users give Apple Mail or Entourage a try, either for integration with other Apple applications or integration with Outlook and Office, they return to Eudora with stories of hanging connections, rules that cannot be opened and edited, and heartbreaking tales of unwanted mailboxes that mysteriously appear, and desperately wanted mailboxes that disappear. Lost mail, lost data, lost address books; all common stories.

Amazingly enough, after so many years on the market, Eudora is still the program to beat. It’s extraordinary to us that Qualcomm just keeps on making this product better, year after year. Eudora’s very minor bugs over the years have never affected the integrity of its files.

We also like Eudora’s pricing model: you can download it for free in sponsored mode, which has an inconspicuous little ad box you can move to where it will annoy you least, or you can simply pay a reasonable $49.95 for the ad-free copy.

Our award for best email program can only go to Qualcomm’s Eudora, which for well over a decade has reigned supreme on both Mac and Windows.