[Macpartners] email message editing: Eudora vs. AppleMail [Was: AppleMail complaint]

[Sue Felshin]

At 2:54 PM -0500 2/1/07, Gurukarm Khalsa wrote:
>Hooray for Marion! Her original question is bringing us all out of 
>the woodwork! I'm glad to know (as I told her) that I'm not the only 
>one missing the editing capabilities of Eudora... Perhaps if others 
>who do as well, respond to this thread too, IS&T will look into what
>help may be available.

I, too, use Eudora's editing capabilities, to update the summary line 
from the original subject line to the actual topic of the message, to 
add http:// when it's missing before URLs so that Eudora will let me 
double click on them to open them in a browser, to reform long URLs 
that have been line-broken for the same reason, and to fix URLs that 
people have mistyped.  Also sometimes to delete pages of unnecessary 
quoted text that make the message too hard to read.  Sometimes to 
_add_ quoted text so that in the future I'll be able to tell what the 
message was referring to, or to describe the content of a URL that I 
think may be dead when I reread the message later.  Sometimes to add 
quoted-text formatting to quoted material that someone pasted into a 
message with plain formatting.  Sometimes to delete duplicate, 
HTML-formatted versions of the message that make the message huge and 
annoy me.  Sometimes to re-form paragraphs when lines have been 
broken at multiple lengths, making the text hard to read.  Sometimes 
to delete excess blank lines that make the text hard to read.  MIT 
people may mostly use good mailers, but a large proportion of the 
general public don't understand how to use their mailers, use really 
bad mailers that produce lousy formatting, and can't or won't write a 
decent subject line.  I don't often take the time to clean up crappy 
mail, but I like that Eudora gives me the option and makes it quick 
and easy.

Regards,
Sue Felshin
sfelshin at csail.mit.edu