“After more than a decade, I’ve switched e-mail programs,” Jeff Carlson writes for The Seattle Times.
“This shift is more than just substituting one piece of software for another. I interact with e-mail almost every day, all day — it’s my main professional connection to the outside world,” Carlson writes. “(I know, I need to get out more.)”
“But the old program, Qualcomm’s Eudora 6.2.4, just wasn’t working anymore in a number of ways, so even though it feels at times as if I’ve had a brain transplant, the change had to happen,” Carlson writes.
“There are plenty of e-mail programs for the Mac, but I decided to go with the home team: Apple’s built-in Mail,” Carlson writes.
“Undertaking this shift wasn’t easy, but I’ve found it to be liberating,” Carlson writes.
Full article here.
It had a rocky start, but Mail, with the combination of MobileMe is awesome!
It works perfectly now on my iPhone.
I still have Eudora for personal mail, Mail.app for work, but I am also reluctantly changing. Eudora has some features that Mail still does not approach – its filters are more flexible than Mail’s rules, its search speed is phenominally fast, and its spam filter in the paid version has a ranking system of 1-100% – perusing it for false positives was always so easy, because I never found any false positives above 15% sureness, so I could quickly sort the spam folder by that factor and only scan down to 20%. Find nothing? select-all, delete, and you’re good to go. Also, the level of depth you could go into the geekiest of settings was phenomenal.
Despite Qualcomm’s lack of development for many years, Eudora remains useful and stable. But I, too, have to leave behind some good things in the past to be ready for the future. Mail is much better than it used to be, but it has a long way to go before I love it like Eudora.
@TheConfuzed1
Is push email, ical and contacts working properly now?
Yes, all the push stuff works great. It has worked pretty much from Day one for me.
I have to kill my Mac Mail app almost daily – it hangs a lot. Deleted pref’s, recreated all the mail accounts, but I still get intermittent mail. Also, MobileMe and Mac Mail seem to want to keep drafts all over the place, even after I send the mail. When I use the MobileMe webpage from work – I’m forced to use a PC there – I use Firefox, and it takes sometimes a minute or more for button presses to effect the desired effect. The system is rife with errors and problems. I resorted to installing and configuring sendmail (postfix actually) and using my command line mail program, which is actually nice, cause I can call it with cron jobs, but alas, that’s a different story. Ugh! When is this thing going to be reliable? Is it because I have gmail and mac imap accounts? Is it because I have several computers that access mail? Oh, that brings up another thing – how come my sent and inbox have different content on all machines, and I’m using imap. Too many issues. Fix it, Apple.
Apple Mail works wonderfully for me with over 80 separate client folders and 4 email accounts.
Thumbs up!!
Apple Mail works wonderfully for me with over 80 separate client folders and 4 email accounts.
Thumbs up!!
I think you have screwed something up on your Mac there Bill. I have four accounts and several pages of folders with several thousand messages, many with attachments and you know what, it hasn’t crashed once, not once, since I switched from Entourage two years ago.
I don’t think there is much for Apple to fix frankly. Try new RAM?
I used Eudora in 1995…I honestly am shocked to learn it’s still around.
I’d love to use Mail and dump Entourage, but until Mail can save mail as mail, I can’t….
@TheConfuzed1,
Same here.
@MacGuy:
What do you mean by “…until Mail can save mail as mail?”
It seems there is a drastic lack of good Mac articles anymore.
Remember the “Rumor” days?
The “PowerPC vs Intel” processor wars?
“Another Windows virus has PC users pulling their hair”
Good old days they were.
*zzzzz*
I really liked Eudora and was very disappointed they chose not to keep it up to date. Like others, I hope that Mail will eventually get up to speed in the areas that Eudora has always led.
I’m with MacGuy as I too would like to switch from Entourage to Apple Mail.
But the one thing preventing this is the level to which I have come to reply on Project Center in Entourage to organise emails relating to my client work (yes, I use just the email component within the Project Center as I already use Address Book and iCal to deal with contacts and scheduling).
Anyone have any guidance on how can I re-produce the Entourage Project Centre using Apple Mail, iCal and Address Book so I make junk Entourage?
Would a combination of Smart Folders in Mail, MailTags and MsgFiler work? Anyone done this already?
Could really do with some help here….
I love Mail, and I’ve used it exclusively since 2002. I particularly like the way it effortlessly searches across the more than 100,000 email messages I need to keep instantly accessible (i.e. non-archived).
With Leopard, however, Apple introduced problems that simply weren’t an issue with Mail in Tiger — for instance, the continued inability to drag items to the Mail dock icon and have it create new messages in Plain Text.
As much as I love Mail, there remain a number of minor, but worrisome, problems with Mail — problems that primarily affect power users — that Apple needs to fix.
I wish I could use Mail but I have one of those old school Yahoo accounts.
Anyone know how to change it so that when you click on an “email me/us” link it launches Safari instead of Mail?
I hate Microsoft, but Entourage is much better than Mail. The flexibility & power of Entourage is FAR SUPERIOR to Mail.
Eudora is LAME, Mac Mail is NICE, but an IMAP GMAIL account is even better! Try it, you’ll like it, especially if you have multiple home computers as well as an iPhone or an iPod touch. I for one use GMail EXCLUSIVELY and I am EXTREMELY pro Apple!
I’ve been using Mail for 3 years now and all was great until MobileMe. Mail on my iMac, MacBook and iPhone 3G work off & on and mail is not pushed well to my iPhone …. did Apple pick up some MS S/W engineers????
I hate Microsoft, but Entourage is much better than Mail. The flexibility & power of Entourage is FAR SUPERIOR to Mail.
—MacBill
Don’t forget that Entourage also includes a nifty feature at no extra cost: Entourage can (and eventually will) become so corrupted that all email is instantly rendered unreadable. What, exactly, is so powerful and flexible about Entourage?
@Bill McCloskey:
The behavior you describe is bizaare and unusual. Something is very wrong with your Mail app, not with the Mail app in general. For most users, it is an exceedingly reliable program with few problems.
I find it hard to live with out googles tags feature.
@Cubert
You can change your default email client under…
Mail Preferences : General : Default email reader
I used Eudora for 13 years. I made the transition to Mail almost two years ago. I am so glad I did.