Mozilla Eudora/Penelope Mail client beta

I use both Eudora and Thunderbird. Obviously, Eudora is a vastly superior program, and anyone who says otherwise is not a serious e-mail user. Eudora gives me filters, incoming and outgoing, drills rapidly down the directory structure, has a small folder footprint, and total stability. IThunderbird constantly hangs and loses mail, is clunky, and amazingly slow and inconvenient. Uggghh!!!

In 15 years of using Eudora I've never lost an email. In 2 years of using Thunderbird I've lost many. But I need its capacity to share mail on a server, so I must use the ugly beast, unfortunately. It doesn't come out well of the daily comparison I make between it and Eudora, I can promise you.

That said, I tried installing "Eudora 8". But why don't they make clear at the outset (and save everyone's time) that this IS Thunderbird with slight cosmetic changes, but otherwise 100% identical?

Why not save everyone's time ?!?

I'm irritated because this is what happened:
1. Eudora 8 (so-called) uninstalled my old Eudora 5.1 without asking me.
2. Eudora 8 then copied in my address book from Thunderbird (not from Eudora) - again, no questions asked.
3. When I unstalled Eudora 8, speedily, like everyone else - no Eudora 5.1 icons! Vanished!

Of course, putting back the icons and making minor changes to revitalize the Eudora installation was a cinch, Eudora being the great little program that it is, so that didn't matter. But still, it grates.

Mind you, kudos to the Penelope team for starting on what I am sure is going to be a horrendous task, transforming the hideous mess that is Thunderbird into something usable like Eudora.

As much as I welcome ANY alternative to the sorry mail client that is Mail.app, if this beta is any indication, there isnt much to get excited about. I see no value in simply repurposing Thunderbird and calling it Eudora. If nothing else, they have to replace the XUL interface with a true Cocoa UI. Until a viable desktop client comes along, I will stick with Gmail via Mailplane.

Why won't it just die like a good little program?

I put Eudora in the same group as Microsoft Works and Publisher. They just won't die.

I am in the "get a better, more modern mail client" crowd. Eudora has so many things missing I don't know where to begin. How about we start with the lack of roll over hints for those tiny buttons that mean absolutely nothing. How about the lack of roll over hints for those teensie mail status flags in the mail list that mean absolutely nothing.
Eudora has been a dead product for a long time. Version 6.2.? invented the "click to loose your email" feature.

Face it. Like OS 9, Eudora as you knew it is dead. I've never had any use for the boatloads of generally useless crap in the "still PPC" Eudora application, and migrating users to new machines while maintaining their attachment links is always problematic, Let alone migration from PC to Mac, or Mac to PC.
The whole idea that the attachments are stripped on download of messages, and stored seperate from the email - in some "Attachments Folder - is just asking users to totally not know where their files are. This attachments folder's location seems to change at least once in a 4-5 year time period for virtually every user. It's a mess, a management nightmare, a joke.
Good ridence Eudora.

Oh, and if you like seeing your mail messages in a new window, just double click the message in either Thunderbird, or Mail.app. Just like Eudora. Modern mail clients will generally provide a minimum of 2 panes. The accounts pane and the mail list. You do not need to display the mail message in a third pain (or second pane in the case of Eudora's mail list).

Actually try the other products before you dismiss them out of hand, please. If you have a question about a feature, check out the on line help, or visit your favorite support forums.

I agree it is too early to pass judgement on Penelope. This is a functional "beta". Some stuff has not been added yet, The interface will likely change a bit more before the final product "ships."
Make your requests early!

Add my name to the "stick with real Eudora" crowd.

I've been using it since System 6. It works, it works well, there are no surprises.

That, and it doesn't automatically top post when replying.

I sincerely tried to like Mail and Thunderbird. Sorry, guys. They have nowhere near the user friendliness on Eudora.

I'll use Eudora until it stops working under Mac OS.

Dextro, Eudora has been working in OS X since 2001. And it is still the best e-mail client out there. I use Entourage at work (for Exchange compatibility) and every single day I yearn for Eudora features that I have at home. Mail.app is missing a couple of dozen features that I use regularly in Eudora. Thunderbird has the all-in-one interface which everyone seems to have taken to like tabbed web browsing; I much prefer each web page and each e-mail message in its own window, thankyouverymuch. So Eudora I will stick with.

iHate new Eudora. It's nothing like classic Eudora, that runs perfectly with may Mac OS X 10.4, in multiple macs.
The "new" Eudora is only Thunderbird with new icons. Blerg!!

There has long been a three-panes-capable, ultrafast-searchable replacement for most Eudora users, that's PowerMail.
Of course it's not free, but apart from this it is definitely efficient.

G - With Mail, you can just read all your messages in the preview window? By default, cursor up and down will scroll through each email, and selecting the one in the preview will enable you to cursor up/down through it.

Mail is a great program - the search is extremely fast. I have probably 20k emails in my inbox, and it'll do a single word search, ordered by relevance, in less than 2 seconds. *BUT*, since moving all my email accounts to IMAP, it's really struggled to keep the various sent / inboxes up to date, so I've had to dump it.

I would love to switch to Mail.app from Eudora 6.0.2, and have something current, as the Eudora coders haven't added a single useful function since OS X compatibility (we get Mood Alerts, a search bar, etc., but no Address Book support or decent HTML display). And all for a paid subscription which runs out just before the next big update is released. What a coincidence.

Maybe someone can help me out here? In Eudora, I can read through all of my new messages *quickly* because of certain keyboard shortcuts, i.e. the Space Bar goes to the next unread message, pages down the current one if it's long, then closes the message if it's the last one. That goes back to PINE! In Mail.app, I'd have to select a message with the mouse, hit Enter or double-click to open it, then hit Command-W to close it, then select the next unread with the mouse again. This seems very slow, no? What am I missing?