[WinPartners] xp vs eudora again

[Kerem B Limon]

Quoting Mike Hobbs <mhobbs at mtl.mit.edu>:

> Eudora is an awful piece of software.  I don't know why people insist on 
> using it as their email client.  Here in MTL we have the exact same 

Yes, now it is so. There (once) was a time--and that time was loooong ago--that
Eudora was the king of e-mail programs on the Windows platform. It had the best
searching options, excellent filtering, and a lot of UNIX-like cornucopia of
mini-tweaks you could do to make it behave the way you want it.

That said, the feature set of Eudora 2 (ca. 1995) with which I started using it
and Eudora 6 are virtually the same, save for some phenomenally useless chili
pepper icons and line graphs that a 3 year old could draw better in the name of
'statistics' (and let's not forget the flop that was "Eudora Sharing
Protocol"). Normally, this is preferable to the likes of the rest of the
industry adding to their competing products heaps of new and unnecessary
features that curtail usability, but c'mon, it's been *4* major versions since.
Where's the cream filling?

My current major beef is that as someone who's been a long time and heavy
power-user of Eudora to-date, it's virtually the worst possible way to store
your mail. It butchers locally stored mail by stripping your attachments,
dumping them somewhere usually non-standard, and placing a _hard_link to where
it is stored. Good luck re-attaching, re-uniting, re-compiling, re-collecting
your mail if you need to move to another environment/machine or God forbid
another mail client. There are ways to do this that I've succeeded with, but
they are way, way too much manual work and that's what a computer is supposed
to do. Anyone who's done this will tell you...and take my word for it as
someone who's written MIT's original Eudora installer that had to tackle this.

As soon as I can transfer my extensive set of regexp filter set to Thunderbird
or another alternative, I am booting Eudora as well, I think. That says
something coming from a 10 year user.

> problem your all describing.  I wish IS&T would move away from this 
> email client and move to something else.  We have a handful of users 

To give due credit, IS&T originally favored Eudora as a matter of necessity,
being the only client on the Windows (and I believe also Mac for a while)
platform that would do Kerberized POP. That is, if you're not counting TechMail
(OK, I just dated myself). Only with the offering of IMAP (over SSL) did
alternatives become possible.

> here who use it but we try and convince users to migrate to Thunderbird, 
> it is a much better email client.
> 
> mike
> 

Ditto, I also heavily recommend Thunderbird and IMAP to our users whenever
possible.

-Kerem

> Philip R Thompson wrote:
> > Yes, eudora crashes all the time for us in DUSP too.  I am begining to 
> > move users to Mozilla Thunderbird.  Release 6 seems worse in terms of 
> > crashing than version 5 and I'm giving up on it.
> > 
> > -Philip
> > 
> > Aran M. Parillo wrote:
> > 
> >> Greetings,
> >>
> >> It seems that every other new machine install I do, users report 
> >> having repeated Eudora crashes.  Fresh XP installs, service pack 2, 
> >> using the 6.2.1 installer and picking up the users eudora folder 
> >> during setup.
> >>
> >> The trend I see in the exceptions log are two files presenting access 
> >> violations.  (MFC42.DLL and MSCTF.dll both reside in \windows\system32)
> >>
> >> Searching the web for answers, I see a vague mention of 'renaming' at 
> >> least MFC42 and reinstalling eudora... but what of MSCTF?  Are these 
> >> access violations just a permissions issue?  Any advice/feedback here 
> >> would be appreciated.
> >>
> >> <windows bashing>
> >> I have to note that it's embarrassing to have owners of new systems 
> >> complain about crashy programs which on their previous systems were 
> >> rock solid... I can honestly count the number of eudora crashes on my 
> >> os x system on one hand... in I only need my thumb to count them... 
> >> for these unlucky XP/eudora users - their logs show multiple daily 
> >> crashes.
> >> </windows bashing>
> >>
> >> TIA
> >> -amp
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> > 
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Kerem B. Limon
kerem.limon at mit.edu /e-mail