If you get lots of e-mail, have multiple e-mail accounts, or just want more control over your e-mail, Eudora is a good way to go. This full-featured e-mail program allows you to manage and organize your e-mail with ease.
The program includes all the standard high-end e-mail features. It supports HTML messages, encryption, return receipts, blind carbon copy, automatic vacation responses, nested folders, mailboxes, and more. It also has flexible filters for helping you deal with spam and e-mail overload. You will enjoy the options that allow you to color highlight messages and add voice or e-mail alerts. Want to send e-mail from your mother to one mailbox, while e-mail from your brother goes to another? Want every e-mail from your doctor to be highlighted in red? Want to hear a special sound when you get e-mail from your boss? No problem. Filter out that pornographic e-mail. Get rid of all those Viagra come-ons. Just set up the filter rules, and Eudora does the rest
As with any robust program, there is a slight learning curve. I find some of Eudora’s nomenclatures, like the use of the word “Nickname,” to be unintuitive, yet easy enough to learn. For everyday features, I find that Eudora is easier to learn and use than Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail program. Eudora’s program can be purchased in a box or downloaded. If you decide to download, the manuals are posted online. The online tutorials are easy to understand and cover all the major features for both PC and Mac versions, making learning easier.
Creating messages with Eudora Pro is easy. It supports QuickTime and HTML-enriched e-mail. It allows the user to include stylized, formatted text in messages. The integrated word processor has an automatic spell checker.
Unfortunately, Qualcomm, Eudora’s creator, hasn’t given the program interface a makeover for quite awhile, so it isn’t as jazzy as some. However, I like the multi-paned interface. Access to your mailboxes, contents of drives, signatures, accounts, and stationary is visible along the left-hand side of the screen. Toolbars are customizable, and the screen panes can be moved and/or resized to suit the user’s taste. Although the interface is slightly dated, Eudora has added some new program features including a Qualcomm PureVoice plug-in that allows voice messages, a Mood Watcher that rates potentially offensive e-mail with red peppers, a conduit for synching with Palm organizers, the ability to save photos in your address book, and e-mail usage statistics that offer insights into the user’s day-to-day e-mail activity and patterns. Another new feature called Eudora Sharing Protocol (ESP) lets the user share documents and discussions among a group of Eudora users without the need for a shared server. This is a great feature for some, but not important for most users.
One reason you may want to consider switching to Eudora is that most virus writers target more popular e-mail programs like Outlook and Outlook Express. Many viruses that e-mail themselves to everyone in the infected computer’s address book are not able to infiltrate the Eudora address book. Eudora does not necessarily protect your address book from all viruses but does lower your potential vulnerability. By the way, if you are thinking of changing, Eudora makes it easy. You can import existing settings, e-mail, and address books from Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, or Netscape Mail programs.
Eudora Pro comes in two versions. The sponsored mode offers use of the full-featured Eudora e-mail program at no charge, but displays a series of rotating onscreen advertisements. The paid mode allows the use of Eudora and all its features without the advertisements. Ads in the sponsored mode appear in the lower left- hand corner of the screen and occasionally on the right side of the top tool bar. At first, I thought the ads would be disturbing, but I quickly became accustomed to their presence. After a few weeks, I was able to completely block them out. As a matter of fact, if you ask me who some of the Eudora sponsors are, I couldn’t tell you without opening the program and looking directly at the ads.
Eudora Pro is available for both PC and Mac. As I write this, Eudora says they are still testing for compatibility with Windows XP. However, I have used Eudora on my Windows XP computer for the last three month with no obvious conflicts or problems.
What’s not to like? Eudora has a few glitches. Like Outlook, it gobbles system resources. While this is usually not a problem, you may want to avoid Eudora if you have a very old computer or sparse memory. Although creating e-mail groups is easy, I could not find a way to organize a group from people already in my address book without a tedious cut and paste operation. Also, each time you open a window, it appears on the bottom of the screen. At times this is very useful. At other times, however, the bottom taskbar becomes cluttered with a multitude of unnecessary open windows. This was bothersome until I discovered that pressing CTRL+Shift+W could close all the open windows with one keystroke.
Just in case you are curious, Eudora was named after Ms. Eudora Welty, the author of “Why I live at the Post Office.”
