“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.
I also used Eudora for a LONG time and finally switched to Apple’s Mail. The only thing I truly miss is the ability to edit an e-mail I received (some times i like to add notes to something a client writes me in an e-mail, etc.). As far as I know, there’s no way to do this in Mail.
Other than that, I’ve been a happy camper…
@MacMan…
As a work-around, could you save the mail in PDF format, then annotate it in Preview?
@MacSmiley
way too complicated – in Eudora, you just clicked a little icon in the menu bar, and you could edit the email. Click again to lock it. I often would strip out obnoxious extra text or headers from important emails. MacMan, I forgot about that feature. You are so right.
I had to abandon Eudora when it began shredding my mailbase immediately after I switched to Leopard. It was surely a bit rustic at the time, but still fast, flexible and (under Tiger) reliable.
Two things I’m still sorely missing in Mail but maybe I’ve just not found the trick yet:
1) In Eudora I could have Eudora automatically move any sent mails into the respective mail folder. With Mail I have to move them manually each and every time which is highly annoying.
2) Eudora displayed my sent mail in italics in the mail list to make them easily distinguishable and it allowed me to still use the color labels to distinguish certain in- and outgoing posts individually. In Mail in- and outgoing mails are indistinguishable at first sight; It is rather cumbersome to keep track of a longer conversation.
Question: Are these two features just absent from Mail or is there any way to re-create them?
@Superdave,
I figured as much but was never able to get past the setup part of Mail. I just did get past it and was able to change that pref. (a few checkboxes in the setup process need to be unchecked to allow you to open Mail for the first time without setting up a working mailbox – otherwise, you are in a catch-22).
I used Entourage until the day it corrupted 5gigs of email in my mail file. Who thought it was a good idea to store EVERYTHING in one file? It sucks for back-up too. Backing up a 5gig file multiple times a day sucks. I switched to Mail and love it. Biggest thing for me was the file storage system. Living with the 5gig mail file feels a lot like Microsoft and 1995… Oh yeah, it is…
@MacMan
With the Notes and to do list built into mail can’t you just do it that way? I know thats how I add special notes or jobs regarding emails.
@Touch–
Yes, for me, MobileMe, and push is working very well, and synchronizing quite nicely.
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I’m not impressed with Mail, it is missing many useful features found in other mail clients. I still much prefer Thunderbird.
Well, now. It seems Mail is better, Thunderbird is better, Eudora is better, and even Entourage has fans. Each has features that become necessary to some users. What a great situation…
Don’t argue, celebrate choice!
@ jds4300
GMail IMAP is pretty good with Apple Mail, but not as good as MobileMe, mainly because of the stupid way that GMail handles mailboxes and forces you to have a Starred and All Mail folder.
The only reason I use Gmail instead of my MobileMe email is because Apple doesn’t support using your own custom domain (as gmail does). If/when they do, I’ll probably switch my email over to MobileMe, but in the meantime Gmail is working pretty well.
Still, I would like the push email on my iPhone…*sigh*
I never was a big e-mail power user. Mac Mail works okay for me, although I never got the smart folders to work. I’m probably not using 50% of what Mail’s capabilities are. A lot of my Mac friends prefer using Eudora and are still quite happy with it.
I agree with Hm… that having choices is always a good thing.
I use a combination of Apple Mail, Mail Tags (an extension for Mail), Address Book, iCal & OmniFocus everyday to manage my projects. I extensively use Mail’s folders, smart folders & rules to keep things organized. Everything works great. Also, I haven’t had any problems with MobileMe. I like it.
For those of you who love(d) Eudora, here is a link I think you should check out: http://www.infinitydatasystems.com/odysseus/index.html. Welcome to the new Eudora.
“The only reason I use Gmail instead of my MobileMe email is because Apple doesn’t support using your own custom domain (as gmail does).”
I use Mail with a private domain and mail server (from eskimo.com) that I have had for many years. The domain name is a 5 character name and is quite prone to attract 1000+ spam emails per day, so I first filter at the Unix server level using procmail (wherein you’ll find that “dev/null” is your friend), then I allow Mail’s spam filter to catch any stragglers. It all works excellently for me.