(Compare and contrast with Learning to live with Thunderbird.)

When I actually stopped to think carefully about it, I couldn’t remember what good reason I had to stop using Eudora in the first place.

I think it was the attraction of Mail in Tiger, and the thought that I might be able to make use of Spotlight searching and Smart Folders. So I left Eudora behind and switched to Mail, but that was really the beginning of months of problems. Mail has so many nice features but slowed me down too much. Then I tried Thunderbird, which lacks some of the same slickness but was more dependable.

But even Thunderbird kept slowing down. When it slowed down once too often for me, I went and downloaded the most recent version of Eudora, installed it and set it up, and was back inside its familiar interface within 30 minutes. And I found that I should never have left it behind.

Eudora may well look like something from the Stone Age, but my word it performs so much better than anything else I have used in the past 18 months or so. Everything is zip-zip fast and takes a fraction of the time that Mail or Thunderbird needed.

So for the third time in as many months, I have changed email software and I am settling down into yet another set of keyboard shortcuts (although actually most of them are familiar from way back and have returned to my fingertips with very little trouble).

In posts passim I made a point of putting Eudora down for various reasons. Perhaps I should just revisit some of them.

Here’s what I said before, with notes about what I think now:

  • The. Toolbar. Must. Die.
    Actually it can be useful, if you map the toolbar to the Function keys, then edit it to only include Menu commands you actually want to use

  • Anything configurable with x-eudora-settings is, by definition, overcomplicated
    Yes, but on the other hand there’s not much you cannot edit using x-eudora-settings, which makes Eudora so much more customizable than other apps

  • It insists on using its own Out folder instead of the Sent messages folder I want it to use on the IMAP server
    I’ve just learned to live with this

  • No manner of clicking on links makes them open in the background. Eudora just can’t stop itself from bringing the browser to the front
    I’ve just learned to live with this, too; Thunderbird did it too

  • Lack of keyboard shortcuts; moving a message from the inbox to one folder on my IMAP server requires too many clicks
    Not now I’ve discovered the trick in point 1, above; now I have F4 mapped to “Transfer to Dominant/Inbox/store”, where ’store’ is my email archive folder

So there, I’m back with Eudora and now that things are so much faster, I am a happy email user once more. There’s much talk in the Qualcomm forums about Eudora’s move to fully-Cocoa later this year; I look forward to that happening, but I really hope that the re-engineering doesn’t slow anything down, purely for the sake of a better UI.

I’ve still got my eye on Kiwi, mind you.