Email The Unexpected Show-stopper In Columnist’s MacBook Transition
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
This been just short of five weeks since my new unibody MacBook arrived here, and while it’s a thing of beauty to behold and seems to work very well so far, I still haven’t switched to using it for my production platform. That isn’t how I had expected things to go.
I had anticipated that there would be some potholes in the transition road from my long-established and highly evolved workflow ecosystem on my Power PC Macs to a MacIntel environment, but I underestimated the degree of disruption it would cause -- much greater than with either the shift from 68k to Power PC in the mid-90s, or switching from the classic Mac OS to OS X in the early ‘00s, both of which I found smooth and largely unproblematic.
Anchor Application
What I really didn’t expect was that email, of all things, would become the show-stopper that it has. I had imagined -- correctly as it turned out -- that I was going to have to make a move from Eudora classic, which has been the anchor application of my production software suite ever since I’ve had an Internet connection. Eudora 6.2.4, the last Mac version before Qualcomm pulled the plug on further development in 2006, has been compromised even on Power PC hardware since the introduction of OS 10.5 Leopard 16 months ago. I’ve been able to continue using it in Leopard on my G4 PowerBook, but it’s not the fluid and smooth performer that it was and still is running in OS 10.4 Tiger and earlier Mac OS versions.
Consequently, I had already discounted the likelihood being able to use Eudora classic with an Intel Mac (yes, I know some folk have been able to get it to work on their MacIntels, perhaps even with Leopard, but I’m guessing they don’t have to contend with the added layers of complication represented by a slow, rural, dial up connection that also imposes a draconian port 25 block on outgoing SMTP server access). However I figured that I would be able to switch to a more up-to-date email client without too much, or difficulty, and that’s where I was mistaken.
Of course, I had to give Eudora 6.2.4 a fair trial anyway. It’s not a program I’m going to find myself able to give up on easily. It started up OK on the MacBook, but refused to recognize the setup settings files that I dragged and from my PowerBook. In the Power PC universe I’ve never encountered any difficulty copying settings files around from machine to machine and system to system, but it evidently wasn’t going to work in this instance. However, even after trashing the Eudora preferences and doing a clean install of the program with a fresh settings file I still was unable to coax Eudora 6 to send email from the MacBook over dial up.
Checking Out The Alternatives
Next I started checking out the alternatives. I had hoped that Odysseus, Infinity Data Systems’ new email software designed to take the much-loved Eudora experience into the MacIntel era and beyond would be ready by the time I was, but so far, the Odysseus 1.0b15 beta build also refuses to send mail from the MacBook. It just stalls. On the G4 PowerBook, Odysseus installs and starts up OK, but I can’t get the individual account check feature to work. Evidently still not ready for the prime time. I still have high hopes for Odysseus, but for now it’s no the solution.
I also checked out the email module in Opera. I like the Opera browser a lot, and always have it up and running, so that seemed theoretically like a practical solution, but Opera Mail doesn’t have enough manual and too much automatic control for me, and if there is any way to just check individual email accounts, I couldn’t find it.
Software That Insists On Doing Stuff You Want To Do Yourself
Similar objections to OS X Mail. I detest software that insists on doing for me stuff that I want to do myself, and Mail is almost Microsoftian in its pushiness and assertiveness about doing things like checking your mail unbidden, a behavior I can’t abide, plus I don’t like the user interface.
And while I much prefer the philosophy behind the Odysseus Eudora replacement project, there is also the “official” open source Eudora/Penelope project at Mozilla.org to which Qualcomm has handed off Eudora branding rights, and which has thus far produced five public beta Eudora 8 releases, which are essentially a front-end with some of the classic Eudora user interface elements and conventions grafted onto Mozilla’s own Thunderbird email client.
Giving Thunderbird Another Serious Look
Eudora 8, and for that matter Thunderbird itself, do have the happy facility of being able to efficiently import settings, contacts, and Mailbox archive files from Eudora 6, which is a convenience of no small magnitude to long time Eudora users. I’ve never been much of a Thunderbird fan, but in light of my current email dilemma, I’ve been giving it another serious look, and have installed it on the PowerBook as well to help ease myself into the transition should I go that route. After a bit of experimentation I’ve managed to get Thunderbird configured so it can send mail over at least a few of my email accounts, and while it’s pretty clunky at the interface level compared with the slickness and speed of Eudora classic, I think I maybe can learn to live with it.
At least I hope I can. Classic Eudora, even in its mildly crippled state running under OS 10.5 Leopard, is still so much nicer, faster, and more convenient to work with than Thunderbird. For a concrete example, in a classic Eudora message window, hitting “Command A” will copy the entire message contents, including header information, to the clipboard, something I do very frequently with press releases , reader letters and such. In Thunderbird, all you get is the message body contents, making a return trip necessary to retrieve the header info. But wait; with Thunderbird I find I can’t even highlight and copy the sender’s address or any of the other header info at all In order to be able to copy the address, I have to open a Reply draft window. What in God’s green earth were they thinking?
Here’s another. With Eudora classic, if I have a bunch of semi-personalized emails to send, as with, say, my newspaper column syndication list, I can just compose an ad hoc master message and then keep hitting the “Send Again” command, adding the unique information to the new cloned message. A wonderful timesaver, but there is no equivalent facility with Thunderbird, in which you have to compose a brand new message from cold each time, which will probably take at least four or five times as long.
Eudora Superb For Users Who Do Serious Work With Email
Anyway, that’s just one among a congery of other minor and not-so-minor angularities in the program that have me wondering if I really can settle for working with Thunderbird as my workhorse email software. Classic Eudora is an application that wonderfully accommodates users who do serious work with email. Fir example, I’ve moderated and posted an email forum list from Eudora for the past dozen years very slickly with minimum demands on my never-plentiful time.
Why I find most vexing about all this is my consternation that no one seems to be able to write a reliable, up to date email program that comes even close to matching Eudora classic’s mastery of the genre for serious email users. I mean, Eudora is 20 plus-year-old technology. But perhaps that’s the problem. Today’s newer email software is written to incorporate a lot of new “bells and whistles” technology that Eudora’s original programmers never had to bother their minds with. Truth to tell, classic Eudora never handled HTML email at all elegantly. This never bothered me much, as I’m a plain text oriented kind of guy, but the sole handling of HTML based messages is now considered a taken-to-granted necessity.
Last, Best Hope?
Well, Infinity Data Systems’ Matt Milano tells me that they’re burning the midnight while working to get the first final build of Odysseus out the door, and then maybe the last best hope I have for decent e-mail performance on my new MacBook, with Thunderbird perhaps filling in as a stopgap.
Into The Cloud
One result of this transition is that I will likely be pushed further into “the cloud” and depending on Gmail Webmail even more than I already am.
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