Talk:Penelope: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:51, 24 December 2006

### Structured Discussion ###

(Please edit in place, and keep this concise, non repeating and bullet pointed. It would be really good to have some feedback from the team.) Aberglas 01:36, 25 October 2006 (PDT) aberglas

General Project Road map, QUALCOMM

What will the relationship between Penelope and Thunderbird actually be?
- Two heads on the same beast, OR
- Two separate project that share some code, OR
- Add best Eudroa features to Thunderbird (aberglas's prefered option)

Roughly How long is QUALCOM realistically prepared to pay for this non-profitable project? (If only for a short time then please do not produce a dead end fork.)
Is the existing Eudora 6.2 (and/or Eudora 7) codebase being open-sourced or abandoned?

S1dorner 15:43, 25 October 2006 (PDT):

We, the Penelope team, do not control what happens in Thunderbird. Therefore, we cannot promise to put *anything* *into* Thunderbird. That's up to Scott.

However, in principle we are much more concerned about happy Eudora users than about promoting the Eudora brand. The more Eudora features Thunderbird gets, the happier I am.

I simply cannot at this stage answer specific questions about structure of any of the releases. I don't know. If it were up to me, there'd be one mailer that was configurable by the user to whatever set of current TBird or Eudora features they liked. Whether that's called Thunderbird, Eudora, Penelope or Lord John Warfin is immaterial to me.

While any comment I might make about length of funding would be speculative and unwelcome by management, it is not in QUALCOMM's interest to lead anyone into a dead-end fork.

The existing Eudora source is unpleasant, encumbered, and not likely to be released in any wholesale way. Parts of it may be used, especially when it comes to importers & such, but if anyone is dreaming of hacking away on Eudora 7.1, give it up now.

BTW, my thanks to everyone who has contributed on this talk page, and my apologies for my tardiness in response.

Joining the project

How do I join the team to develop the new email client? I've got some ideas for development notably a way to link thunderbird and eudora (trademark of Qualcomm)fairly rapidly, so comments and ideas can be sought before development goes ahead, and Eudora becomes Thunderbird. Thats the danger here.

Top Eudora Features not in Thunderbird -- System Structure

The fact that attachements are external files, not in the main mailboxes. (Thunderbird mailboxes quickly become huge and unmanageable.) [Vote for 359319 if you like this feature.]

The fact that address books are not restricted to local drives but can be put/referenced on any network share for multi-user benefits (e.g. corporate environment)[Vote for 359320 if you like this feature]

Top Eudora Features not in Thunderbird -- Mail/Search/Filters

The fast, integrated search.[Vote for 359331]

Able to (optionally) group inbound and oubound mail, almost in GMail like "conversations". And displays the correct user in the Who column (unlike Outlook etc.)[Vote for 359270]

The ability to manually set server status of mail - e.g. Set up Eudora to not delete messages from the server, once mail is retreived and you don't need to retrieve it on another email client or while away, you can then tell Eudora to delete from server from the pop up menu.

The ability to manaully filter email messages using a single keystroke, such as Apple-J on OS X version. Filters in Eudora are invoked manually or automatically or both. If manually (select messages, then filter) this must be possible with a single keystroke rather than using a menu.

Top Eudora Features not in Thunderbird -- UI General

Platform-native UI
Multiple windows rather than multiple panes for mailbox display [Vote for 359422]

Top Eudora Features not in Thunderbird -- Security

Inbuilt, crude and thus (relatively) secure HTML viewer. Passing all incoming mail to a full browser is asking for trouble. (Thunderbird does have some facilities in this regard, but it still uses Gecko.) Security by design rather than by patch.

Top Eudora Feature not in Thunderbird -- Mail redirection

Eudora allows you to redirect incoming mail to another recipient by modifying the header of the original mail. This is a wonderful feature when you are a team leader and you have to dispatch mail coming to your mailbox.

The filter in Eudora is wonderful and I will like it in Penelope.

The Ability to group incoming and outgoing mail in the mbox to follow the trend of a discussion.

### Post by Post discussion follows ###

More details?

Where and when will more details on planned features, and the Penelope roadmap, be available? I am especially interested in the UI plans for the Mac version of Penelope -- will a platform-native UI be provided, or will Penelope use the same kind of multiplatform (XUL?) UI that Thunderbird uses? The following thread on the Eudora forums might be of interest to Penelope developers: [1] and any responses would be welcome. Thanks for beginning this project; I'm eager to hear more information (e.g. when will a CVS repository be established, so we can see what's being developed and contribute?). -- Rbellin 11:15, 11 October 2006 (PDT)

My Want-List for (Mac/Windows)Eudora

What to add: 1. A universal binary for Intel Macs (Mac) 2. Eudora badly needs to understand UTF-8 (Mac) 3. Though I always send plain text emails, Eudora badly needs to know how to render the piles of HTML emails I do receive. (Mac) 4. Add more than 2 options in the filters; add a GREP interface for filters. (Mac/Win)

What not to change: 1. No forcing me to use a triple interface. I want every mailbox to open automatically as a list in a separate windows when new emails are filtered into the boxes. (Mac)359422 2. Maintain the wonderfully complex and innumerable preferences. (Mac) 3. Maintain the Eudora Folder, so I can easily synch with multiple computers. (Mac) 4. Keep the emails/boxes as simple text files. (Mac) 5. Zap the resource fork prefs. (Mac) -- Kernos 2:42, 11 October 2006 (CDT)

What to delete: 1. Emoticons (who needs that?) (Win) 2. Bosswatch (no sense detected!) (Win) 2. Delete any options or change their defaults ('use microsoft viewer', 'allow executables in html-content', 'automatically download html graphics'. (Win) -- Pharao 15:07, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

What to add: (Win) -- I'd like the attachments to travel with the email when it is moved to a different folder. (Win) -- Click on tab to folder window in main window, then press delete, folder window goes away. (Win) -- One click backup-to-zip. Click on this and your entire structure is backed up to a .zip file. Handy when changing computers, updates, etc. What to keep: Most all of it -- especially the simplicity -- of interface, operation, use, etc. What to remove: Bosswatch -- why is this there?? -- drb,-- 2008 (pac) 18 Nov. 2006.

We don't need another Outlook clone - we'd like Eudora

The reason people buy Eudora (OK, some get it in Paid) is because they like the particular things it does.

My tuppence: HTML rendering can be handled by the HTML engines in respective OSs. Then let's keep the things that Eudora does do - mailboxes in their own windows 359422 (and remembering where they are), scriptability on Apple at least, and - oh yes - speed. Speed is the real killer bit. Speed of searching even very very big (text file) mailboxes, speed of sorting and checking.

I'd really like to be able to import messages to Eudora from Thunderbird. At the moment that is not an option. Thanks!

How about Linux?

One major reason I'm running Windows emulation on my Linux box is so I can keep running Eudora. I've been waiting for Eudora or Linux for years. I haven't ported to a Linux mail client because I've got dozens of folders and hundreds of mailbox files and addressbook stuff that got mangled the only time I did a serious try at changing over.

If "Eudora" in future is going to be a shell or other sort of extension running over Thunderbird, can that shell/extension be ported to Linux?

Eudora features that matter to me

Here are some of the things that make me stick with Eudora:

Ability to display mailboxes in individual windows.[359422] Ability to set mailboxes to open when new messages filter into them.

Option-click grouping. The ability to rapidly group all messages in a thread, or all messages from a particular author, comes in handy all the time.[Vote for 359267]

AppleScript scriptability. (I know, I know... getting that supported in Thunderbird will be really rough, but without it, things will not be good.)[Vote for 360939]

Keyboard shortcut to move to the next message in the stack while a current message is open. This behavior is something I've come to rely on in Eudora, and it drives me up a tree that Apple Mail doesn't do it. (Yes, I prefer to read my messages in separate windows, not in a preview pane.) Jsnell 16:39, 11 October 2006 (PDT)

Customizable labels on Toolbar with Customizable colors -- this is one of Eudora's best features others don't have, with the only problem being that one is currently limited to 7 colors/labels. Kei

Please Keep Mailbox File Structure

Though I love many things about the Eudora interface, the most important reason I have never moved to Outlook is the terrible way Outlook has of saving your entire email archive in a single, gigantic file.

I've had that single gigantic file get corrupted at various jobs I've worked where they forced me to use Outlook. It's also a tremendous pain to back it up.

Please keep Eudora's mailbox file structure.

I SECOND THIS! The above hits my primary love of Eudora on the head! - arfon

I THIRD this. The reason I have not switched to any other email software is the wonderful mbox structure. - Dave Barnes (dave@marketingtactics.com)

Totally agree. Outlook has hosed my mailboxes on several sites, and it is a serious pain to recover. The simple mbox format is much safer.

YES YES YES!!! This is by far the most important reason I use Eudora. -CharlesS

I agree the basic structure shouldn't be radically altered, however, my only bugger with the format as are three fold. a) the mbox format is formatted as a Mac OS 9 format, so to recover it using any unix tools you must reconvert the mailbox to unix line endings. b) there should be a unique begin message/end message 'marker' ... ok I say this, because once I got screwed by Eudora's auto-mailbox-recovery..and had to try manipulating things using csplit. c) the mailbox should be allowed to grow way past 32,000 messages...doubly so if it auto-mailbox-recoveries...now, if due to uncompressed mailboxes, you go over the 32,000 message hard-limit, it will recover your messages -- but your mailbox can't be opened.

I'd like to see bigger (MAYBE INFINITELY) mailboxes. -dfass

I think the .mbx/.toc pairing is one of eudora's strong features, which contributes a lot to its ability to move and group messages fast. Unless there is good reason, I would prefer the mbx structure was left as is and new features were added by improving the .toc format -tropos

I think one of the major goals of Eudora is the Find gui. With those beautiful combos to filter the search, you can find anything in a second.

I tried out Thunderbird and thought it was great. But the one big mailbox structure, and how it was stored, killed it for me. With Eudora I keep my mailboxes in an encrypted partition (Truecrypt), the program elsewhere. Thunderbird put it all in an unlterable default in my C: drive.

I also like the mbx/toc pairing. The directory structure works very well, don't mess with it.

Switched to Eudora 4-5 years ago when Outlook and it's files were corrupted by a windows zero-day breach. Microsoft DID try to step through me through several recovery attempts but even re-installing OS couldn't get it to re-read original files. Eudora actually read and imported those same files that Outlook itself couldn't read. The simple file structure is beautiful. Give me plain text readable by any word processor ANY DAY over "time-bomb" proprietary formats no matter how "cool" they are.

Feature request

The ability to cc: without Attachment (e.g. ccw/oA: ) so one can send the primary recipient an attachment but not saddle the cc recipients with the attachment. I've been requesting this for years and would probably switch to whatever mailer implemented it (except Outlook of course). john coleman [359426]

Something I've always wanted in Eudora: checkboxes in the dropdown recipient list.

By recipient list I mean the list that drops down when you do Message | New Message To or Edit | Insert Recipient

Right now if I want to CC an email to ten people I need laboriously Insert each Recipient seperately.

I've wanted a checkoff list for as long as I've used the program.

- I have always wanted a basic calendar. Nothing fancy, just something simple like the Palm Desktop calendar. -CharlesS

- The address book is clunky. It would be great to rethink this and make it more user friendly. -CharlesS

- I have always wanted a way to archive old messages into a folder of its own so I can get them offline! This should include the attachments and embedding. -MISchwartz [359427]

---

PRUNE - I have asked several times for the "Prune" command. "Prune" allows one to select a date and delete all messages in a folder with a dat equal to or prior to the date entered. This feature would be particularly helpful in the trash folder where I would like to keep only the last 2 months deletions. - Kernel

Kernel -- But, you can save a search to do your PRUNE-ing... e.g. Search Trash with criteria Date before xxxx, then, run, select all, and delete. -dfass --- Sound - From time to time I receive a message with an imbeded graphic that includes sound. At present, the sound is lost if the message is forwarded. I'd like to see this corrected. - Kernel

The 'attach file' window is no longer sizable under ver. 7.1 with Windows XP. Please bring it back.

-rcommage

Priorities & Philosophy

I think that it would be good to know & discuss the priorities & philosophy for development work. The initial Roadmap is vague, though understandably at this time. I look at this primarily from a Mac OS X viewpoint, looking at 3.0a1.

For priorities, many of us have supported Eudora on both Mac and PC platforms for many years. Over the years, users have drifted to other clients for a variety of reasons. #1 priority for me, on a tech support level, would be a way to bring back users from other clients in a reliable and functional way. This may necessitate a stand alone converter/translator similar to Emailchemy. All other email clients to Eudora, Mac or PC. Maintain attachment and inline graphic information and location.

Next priority would be to tie into existing OS X technologies, similarly to Mail. Support for live Address Book access and updating (not a one time import feature)[359277], iCal events, etc. Build for new Leopard technologies in this area.

Comment: As a Windows user, I might suggest a more open basis for Address Book access. Consider the vCard[2] format for exchange of address information. - Kernel

Allow multiple prefs.js files to open separate groups of identities. I currently use multiple Eudora folders, each with multiple personalities, each accessed via alias to Eudora Settings file. This could be accomplished using multiple Profile folders and a Profile Manager.

Philosophically, what will the look and feel be like? Tri-panel is very restrictive, and too much like Outlook. Allow for more windowing flexibility like Eudora Mac currently has.[359422] Multiple open mailboxes unbound from the tri-panel. Drag and drop messages between mailboxes and to the desktop. Don't confuse mailboxes with folders. Eudora does it right by allowing a folder that you put mailboxes in. A folder with both email and another folder is too confusing for many.

Use Mac UI similarly to the way Camino departs from Firefox and Mozilla, yielding a better user experience. Need to explicitly line out the differences between the existing Thunderbird project and Penelope. i.e is Penelope superseding Thunderbird? Is it parallel development, so both clients survive? Will Eudora 7 PC code and Mac Eudora 7 UB code (if existent) be combined to a common source base and then integrated with Thunderbird? Or will it be all new development, just bringing the "look and feel" and some features of Eudora to Thunderbird via extensions and themes?

Jim

Features Discussion

I have over 200,000 messages in my assorted mailboxes, so the search and filter functionality is key to me. I've got over 100 filters (and many more that have been retired), so they need to keep current functionality, stay fast, and improve: more than two criteria would cut down the number I need.

I like the Windows indexed search, but I'd like Spotlight integration as well/better, as long as it's fast. I agree with the commenter who wanted to use system-wide functions when possible.

I use less than 10 personalities, and managing that seems easy.

As a long-time Eudora user with way too much mail to consider migrating, I'd like to see a feature comparison or gap analysis so I know what good things are coming from T-Bird that I just never bothered to find out about.

Also, I'd prefer if it used the system rendering engine so it wasn't extra-bulky. WebKit on MacOSX, please.

My $0.02, Michael Croft

Suggestions

While I love Eudora & have used it since 2.x but I also would love to see a Calendar feature such as Lightning & some improvements in the address book as far as contacts are concerned & in this way I finally can get rid of Outhouse.

For the most part tho I would take great care not to change too much with the existing program as you wouldn't want to alienate the existing user base.

I belong to an Eudora 4 Windows email list & I hope that continues as I much prefer that to online forums altho those aren't as bad as they use to be since more & more people are acquiring hispeed access but email lists cater better to those who as stuck with dialup.

Thank You for listening to my requests.

WaViJo

I would like a non-blocking-gui find. But don't touch anything else in the find window!!

Flagos.

Unicode: sine qua non

One reason people like me stick with Eudora and don't move to Mail or Thunderbird is that we rely on Eudora's simplicity and functionality. A lot of that has to do with keyboard navigation through messages and mailboxes. I see that "remapping of accelerator keys" is one of the things scheduled for Release 0.1. I hope that this does not change navigation behaviour too much, but I am not sure what "accelerator" means here.

Another reason is that Eudora is simple but powerful enough to manage our e-mail. I have 21,000 items in my In box, 69MB, some going back as far as 1995. I do use other mailboxes, and am not a mindless packrat -- but my In box is large, and serves as my file-cabinet. My Out box too is large, 26,000 items, only 34MB. I don't know about Thunderbird, but Apple's Mail can't handle this at all as far as I can see.

There is only one area in which Eudora is actually broken, and I would like to beg the team to make fixing this their priority. The essence of e-mail is plain-text communication. Not spam protection, or fancy filtering, or scripting, or HTML. But plain old text in languages that people want to use. And that's were Eudora fails us: The text engine has not been updated to enable processing of UTF-8 text both in and out. Evertype 03:09, 12 October 2006 (PDT)

More on Unicode support as priority.

Demographic reasons (priority as importance): Without unicode support, Penelope would be just as useless for the majority of potential users as Eudora is useless now. I use Eudora at work (though it sometimes has problems even with the diacritics of the "Western" charset), but have to use Thunderbird at home for my private mails in Russian. And yes, people wanting to communicate (also) in other languages than English constitute the majority of the Internet users, though for obvious reasons they may be under-represented in this forum.

Technical reasons (priority meaning doing it first): It should be much easier to have the software treating every text as a unicode text than to decide every time which encoding is it now. Convert e-mails to unicode on arrival, then forget about the encodings. --Funfilder 11:41, 11 November 2006 (PST)

'Not only Unicode'

If there is one thing painfully missing from Eudora for all its life so far, that is support for Right-To-Left writing languages, including Hebrew. Eudora is barely able to read Hebrew coded messages, and totally unable to write. I know there are some work-arounds on the Mac (for reading, as the Mac itself is as bad with writing from the other side of the page). There are many users who simply cannot work with this wonderful program because of this 'small' limitation. Furthermore, as opposed to Outlook, and in addition to what has already been written above, I think that the ability to choose encoding should be very easy to find (and not deeply hidden) as well as the ability to set default encodings, just as in any web browser, but no current email program. Finally, the message should be able to be saved with that encoding for any future viewing. Adrian 11-11-2006

Comment by Wataru: The ability to set default encodings is in "no current email program"? If I understand correctly, this ability is already in Thunderbird, which even lets you set it on a per-folder basis and per-account basis; and it is implemented in many other email programs I use as well. I agree entirely that Penelope needs to have full international language support to be meaningful.

Tenga Wataru

Mailbox structure

I agree with everyone else about leaving the mail boxes as text files, but I can see lots of room for improvement there also.

1. Move the location of the mailboxes away from the application directory. 2. Don't throw all attachments and embedded content into one directory. Have an attachment directory and an embedded directory for each mailbox. This will make it easy to archive mailboxes by copying the mailboxes and the related directories.

(I can only speak for the windows version, but I've been doing this (1) for ten years now. Just pass the location of eudora.in as a parameter to eudora exe it will use that location as the mailbox directory. -tropos)

What makes Eudora the best

1/ The Filter system. This is far superior to any I have seen in other email clients. I am particularly fond of "intersects address book" and "matches regexp" without which I would find life very difficult.

2/ The file system. i.e. the fact that all important Eudora files, including address books and mailboxes, are in plain text format.

3/ Stationery. Speaks for itself.

4/ The Junk mail system. Works fine for me most of the time.

5/ Compared to Outlook, Outlook Express and others, it is relatively safe from attack by viruses etc.

6/ The look and feel. I (have to) use Outlook at work and its just not in the same league as Eudora which I find friendlier, easier and faster to use.

I'd like to see the folder structure come through this intact

I've got 3.5G in various Eudora mailboxes and folders. (I've been using Eudora since 1999.

I use Eudora e-mails to myself as pointers to my reference collection.

I'd also like to see the internal message search engine improved. . . (I'm using Lite). . . a search box with free-text entry of Boolean operators (AND OR NOT NEAR DATE) would be really, really nice.

There really isn't any real reason once basic functionality is achieved, that the UI can't be improved to the point where Eudora becomes the mail client of choice for power users again.

Effective work with large mailboxes

People's mailboxes are getting bigger and bigger, often containing gigabytes of data and hundreds of thousands of messages. Web mail providers nowadays offer gigabytes of space with very good browsing and search capabilities. But a lot of desktop email clients (at least Thunderbird) still don't work well with such large amounts of mail, and almost none of them (except Eudora) has a fast search feature. This is where I think Eudora, with its good handling of large mailboxes and its Ultra-Fast Search, can contribute the most to Thunderbird.

Really, every mail client can read and send email, but it's handling large amounts of data that separates serious production-quality products from toys. Please take this into consideration during development of Thunderbird and Penelope if you want serious people to use them. And if T. and/or P. also had a fast search feature, that would mean a great competitive advantage and would make it one the best email clients.

The Search is the thing!

I'm a Mac user.

The thing I MOST NEED is the Boolean Search! Why Apple hasn't seen fit to include this, despite the fact that they implemented it at the Finder level is beyond me. (Try CMD-F from the Finder and wonder for yourself why you can't do that in Mail.app!) And don't anyone even START on the use of "Smart Folders" as a workaround. It's not even CLOSE to being the same! Thunderbird seems to lack this functionalty as well, which is why I haven' switched to it already. I NEED to be able to find all messages, for example, from "greg" sent in march of 2005 with the word "server" in the subject and the word "crash" in the body. Oh yeah, and these messages could be in any number of mailboxes, so I should be able to define WHICH mailboxes get searched! This is CAKE in Eudora!

I'll also need the ability to change Thunderbird's Command Keys to what Eudora's used to be. I'm stuck on CMD-M to manually check mail, CMD-R, CMD-OPT-R, CMD-J, CMD-F, CMD-Y... I use them without thinking!

Eudora's stats are fun.

The chili peppers are cool too, and I have saved my own butt more than once because of Eudora's "wait-10-minutes-before-sending-a-hot-message" thing.

I'm sure I'll think of more, but the search really is the big thing.

What I'd like to see...

I'm not a power user, but I've been using Eudora/Mac for about eleven years now. I really want to see the individual windows for different mailboxes and messages maintained; the three-pane interface that so many email clients use just doesn't cut it for me. Judging from the other posts here, I'm not alone.[ Vote for 359442]

In addition, the search feature is terrific, and I'd like to see that continued, as well as the excellent junk mail filter. Like others, though, I'd also like to see more than two arguments possible for any given filter. I love the way I can make Eudora do what I want it to do via its multiple prefs, though, and I sincerely hope that Penelope will be as "friendly" an application. At present, Eudora can be as simple or as complex as we users want it to be -- and that's the way a good application *should* be.

Making Penelope capable of interacting with iCal and Address Book 359277 would be a definite plus. It's awkward having to maintain two address books, since the import of Address Book into Eudora at the moment isn't a dynamically updated one.

What's important to me ...

from http://emperor.tidbits.com/webx/?50@382.uFgFba7FrRQ@.3c804d7a - "Steve Dorner admits he doesn't know which parts of Eudora are most useful to its proponents" - so, since I've been using Eudora for 11 years, and since I got burned dabbling with other email clients, here are my votes:

OVERALL

... it is Speed, Reliability, Flexibility that keeps me using Eudora ...

ESSENTIAL TO THE EUDORA EXPERIENCE (on a MAC):

1. The speed of mailbox search : the trust that comes of knowing that I can find anything from my 11 years worth of email in seconds or less (please forget Spotlight integration if this would mean changing the mailbox structure in a way that might compromise reliabilty - Eudora search is fast enough)359311

2. The Eudora Folder : the simplicity of being able to move the Folder over from computer to computer knowing that Eudora will open exactly as I left it the previous session on a different machine - so so useful in many situations: back-up, losing a machine to maintainance, lending/borrowing computers

[davidmorr: It is not entirely true that you can just move the Eudora Folder to other machines. On Mac Eudora, if you have filtered attachments into different folders, Eudora can only find them again if they are put back in the Attachments folder. The filter definitions also lose track of the folder you wanted them to go to. Hopefully, Penelope will deal with this issue. ]

3. Separate attachment folder: having the choice of moving the entire mailbox structure over to a new computer quickly (for emergency situations) knowing that you can come back to pick up the attachments later - a big time saver 359319

(((I suspect that these three points are interrelated - I should add that I have NEVER experienced corrupted or lost data in Eudora)))

4. Configurablity - compared to anything else, Eudora seems almost infinitely configurable - from simple to complex

5. UI choice - separate windows for mailboxes 359422 - vertical or horizontal toolbar[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359276 59276] - abilty to add many different commands to toolbar 359274 - for me the UI, despite looking uglier every day, is nonetheless flexible enough to be usefully rearranged for working on anything from a tiny laptop screen to a huge desktop monitor

6. Filters and Spam Filtering that just work

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT FOR MAC OS (in no particular order)

1. Unicode support

2. HTML rendering

3. Ctrl-clicking bringing up contextual menus

4. OS X Address Book and iCal integration

5. IMAP support

UI SUGGESTIONS

1. for the power email user - create a infinitely configurable UI that allows you to arrange your desktop email experience as you like - I imagine something like a pro-design app feel a la Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc that makes use of a vertical/horizontal toolbar that you can customise with just about any command, and dockable panels for things like mailboxes, signatures, settings etc

2. for Grandma!!! - an optional 3-pane view - so she gets the fast search and reliablity, without having to confront the power user interface

... why not have the best of both worlds, including an ability to display in 3-pane mode is absolutely consistent with one of Eudora's fundamental propositions - choice!

WHAT NOW?

I wait. Eudora 6.2.4 serves me well enough. I'd like more from my Eudora experience but fundamentally I'm not prepared to move on, and undergo the mail/filters import pain, while there's still some hope that I could have a new app that will leave my Eudora folder intact. I'm not moving to Thunderbird as it exists now

Why I use Eudora - key features

1. Ease of handling many email accounts from a simple single interface.

2. Ease of creating complex filter rules for organizing incoming email by source, topic, email account, etc.

3. Rapid search by header only, receipients, From, To and entire body of All Mail Folders or just a subset.

4. Ability to turn off viewing Images and HTML in email. Keep this as an option. {I may be one of the few that do not want integrated HTML rendering. 95% of HTML messages are JUNK and for the few I want to see, Open in Browser works great.}

5. Simple visual interface for determining which Mail Folders contain unread messages.

6. Drag & Drop or transfer of messages between mailboxes.

7. Uncluttered interface that lets me keep several frequently used Mail Folders open and easily accessable.

8. SPAM Watch is a great tool. I get 300-350 messages a day filtered into the Junk Folder, which I keep sorted by Junk Score. This lets me quickly scan the low junk score messages for false positives and/or search on key Subject words that I want to move out of Junk. There are still 15-20 JUNK messages left each day in my IN box, so any improvement in the filtering is always welcome.

9. Filter Report is very useful.

10. The ability to REDIRECT an email comes in handy when that is what you really want to do instead of a FORWARD.

11. Abilty to be able to pick which headers get displayed is great.

12. Nickname expansion and auto complete are very handy.

13. Spell Check(along with it's feature options) works very nicely and is an important feature, as is the ability to warn if you forget to include a Subject.

14. The toolbar is handy as it is and would be even better if there was some support for simple scripting to allow something like Move to Folder, Mark Read, Set Label to...; all from one button.

15. Being able to set POP settings by Personality comes in handy occasionally.

16. Being able to set the Moving Around options to fit how you work is nice.

17. The simple folder structure for storing email is much better for backing up and moving to another computer (even Mac to Win) than the single file approach taken by many.

18. Option-Click Sorting on Who & Subject is something I use at least once a day, usually followed by a scan of the messages using Splat-DownArrow to open the messages in order to review an email exchange.

19. Reply Quoted Section (select, shift-Reply) is something I use all the time to keep replys short. Ability to select disjoint text (maybe auto add <<snip>> in the gaps) and to do this when Forwarding a message would be a welcome improvement..

I'm sure I've missed something important, but I think this is a fairly complete list of what I find most useful and why I stick with Eudora. Mood Watch, Content Concentrator and Scam Watch have not been useful to me and I have then all turned off. ScamWatch might be handy if I could "turn-it-on" only when I wanted with say a CTRL-MouseClick over a suspicious link. I don't use the Preview Pane as I prefer to use the Splat-DownArrow to move through messages I am reading, which is why Content Concentrator has never been useful.

-Landy

What an odd combination

Thunderbird and Eudora are certainly odd bed-creatures. Their interfaces are quite different, both for mail operations and for setting preferences. What kind of interface will Penelope have? Is Penelope going to be close to Eudora, with Thunderbird existing separately?

From my standpoint, each program has its own strengths and weaknesses,in addition to which there are some important features that neither has.

Eudora's biggest advantage is the rules-defining interface, which lets us define many different rules and actions easily. Thunderbird's strengths are its excellent IMAP4 support, language and character set support (an area where Eudora falls down badly), ability to read all unread messages with the spacebar alone across all folders and accounts, and the popup notifications.

Both programs have heavy footprints and use too much memory. Their biggest weaknesses, though, are the poverty of template variables, and inability to assign templates to folders and/or contacts (see The Bat! for an example of both). Those of us who use the same email client for friends, mailing lists, and business really need to have this functionality. (Eudora by default uses the "On [date], you wrote" template, which can be switched only in the prefs file, and is universal for all folders and accounts. This is unacceptably poor. Thunderbird is only marginally better.)

So what will Penelope strive to be?

Please see also http://wiki.mozilla.org/User_talk:Wataru for more details.

My fav Eudora features

I've been using Eudora (paid) since it was originally introduced on the Mac, although for the last decade or so I've been on the PC version due to workplace constaints (no Macs allowed). You can imagine how much mail I've accumulated in all that time. Anyway, I want to take this opportunity to thank Steve for such a quality product.

That said, these are the features I absolutely need to see on the new version (in no particular order):

- Being able to migrate my existing filters. I love Eudora's filtering, and not only do I need to keep the same capabilities, but I don't want to have to recreate my list of filters.

- The indexed search is awesome, including the updates for 7.1. It's made me happy that I chose to never delete any email - searching is now a joy rather than a pain.

- Personalities, and the relay personality.

- Thanks for accommodating gmail's weird servers, and please keep that new feature as well.

- Drop and drag attachments.

- As has been mentioned many times, the folder setup with a private folder per user and a separate attachment folder, and text mail files.

- Autocompletion when typing email addresses.

- Easily removing all formatting so you know when a message will be sent in unadorned ASCII, on a per-message basis.

- Ability to edit the from email address on outgoing email (in addition to defining a new personality for well-used email addresses)

- Plugins for removing quotes, unwrapping text, changing capitalization, etc.

- Spell checking.

- Customizable toolbar359274and359276, with just about every capability being available as an icon

- Options to leave mail on server or not, individually download complete messages, delete from server, etc.360963

- Junk filter.

- Contextual menus.

Thanks again for a great product over the years.

Andy Malis amalis@gmail.com

Another voice...

While I've removed the icon from Eudora from my desktop and am trying to exclusively utilize T'bird, the things I miss are:

Search. Yup - Eudora rocked for searches.

Filters. Seemed solid in Eudora, could just be growing pains for me w/ regards to getting used to T'bird's.

What I'd like? The ability to easily edit and/or delete addresses from the autofill information that Eudora stored. Again, maybe it's user stupidity but after several years of using Eudora, I could never intuitively find how to do this.

Thanks!

Plain Text Mailbox Structure, Filters, Searchability

The number one thing that has kept me using and returning to Eudora since 1993 (?) is the simplicity of the mailbox structure, which uses plain ASCII text files. I have never lost nor known anyone to lose a single message in Eudora, and plain ASCII text is a huge part of this. Plain ASCII also makes the search function faster and I *love* the power of filters when combined with search.

Please maintain the current plain-text mailbox structure, separate folder for decoded attachments and default behavior to place everything in the one "Eudora Folder." Thank you thank you thank you for having been there all these many years. I adore Eudora!

Just in case...

Looking at the commentaries so far, it's almost unnecessary to add my opinion... But you did ask for "user input". Eudora's mail store is fantastic: Single and simple (text) files per mailbox, clear hierarchy, easily movable, and, most importantly, easy to backup and restore. Entourage/Outlook and any other program that uses a single file for storing mail are unusable for me: The nightmare of having to back up a 5GB file just because a single 1K message was added...

Pretty much second on my list is the "Who" column 359270, since I'm usually aware of who I am; an excellent way to save space on the screen.

Thanks for keeping Eudora alive!

Labels

One feature I'd really like to see retained is the ability to color messages through the use of labels. I have several filters setup to change the color on a message based on recipient fields (red if I'm the To: recipient, blue if CC'ed, green if sent to a mailing list, etc). Makes it very easy to quickly scan your inbox and decide which messages to read first based on their color.

[Mdudziak: Penelope (Thunderbird) already does this, though they are called 'Tags', not Labels']

AppleScript

Keep the AppleScript-ability please! I have a set of about 20+ scripts that I use all the time, partly triggered with key shortcuts, helping me deal with my email. AppleScript makes Eudora infinitely extensible, just like current day plug-in mechanisms, only that this one has been available for ~ 15 years.

Feature Requests

...from another one who's been using Eudora since the internet only consisted of 2 guys with a stick...

1) I want to be able to take my current personalities, mail folders, preferences and plugins with me, seamlessly, when I upgrade to the new open source version.

2) send html e-mails

2a) Send html web pages I create in another appplication such as GoLive or Dreamweaver.

3) receive and display properly html e-mails (duh)

4) Seamless Address book integration. Right now Eudora is my main contacts manager...but more and more apps use Apple's Address book integration to function so I find I have to transfer contacts from Eudora into Address book just to use this other app. I don't like having 2 address books to manage the same info. I also don't like not being able to sync my phone or other devices directly with Eudora. I'd like to, within Eudora, be able to write and edit addresses directly within Apple's Address book.

5) I can't emphasize # 1 enough. I've got a thousand years worth of e-mail in Eudora and I want it to seamlessly import or be utilized by the new app.

6) Keep the super-fast searching.359311

7) Double clicking on a mail field such as name or subject causes all of the messages with the same name or subject to group together. Love that. Keep that. 359267

8) Send all current Eudora users $100. (Hey this is a wish list)

9)Add (yes, I know, it is a lot of work) an address importer/editor so one can collate several address lists (thunderbird, eudora, mozilla, palm, even outlook which I never use), eliminate duplicates, fix errors, and even export, at least in some formats; Thunderbird certainly.

My opinions

I tried switching to Thunderbird but immediately gave up on it because it has no option I could find corresponding to 'Open in Browser'. I don't want my mail client automatically rendering HTML. I want to send selected messages to my browser of choice (Safari) where I can use the full features of the browser including saving in webarchive format. 360966

I want to keep the ability of opening non-HTML messages in a separate window with a button I can click to increase the font size. A major improvement in this area would be to have more than just the two sizes - either separate buttons for increasing/decreasing the font size or a drop down list. [Mdudziak: Thunderbird (Penelope) already supports this via Command-+ and Command-- (minus) when viewing a message, be it html or plain text.]

Contextual menus would be a great addition. I'd like to option-click on a message and get a menu with items such as 'Open in Browser' for example.

I'd also like the return of a feature that was lost somewhere along the way. When I click 'Check for Messages'. I'd like the program to tell me explicity when I have no new messages so I know when it is finished checking. If this is a problem for scripts or other mechanisms that implement an auto-check feature, perhaps the 'no mail' notification could be a user-selectable option. 360970

I definitely want to retain the ability to specify the e-mail address that recipients of outgoing mail see as my address since I have my incoming mail re-routed to my "real" e-mail address which might change from time to time.

eudora 7.1 user waiting for Penelope....

Well I suspected Qualcomm wanted to dump Eudora (the little stepchild). It is a great product and I have been using it daily since 1998 along side firefox since 0.8. I have done some beta testing and would consider myself an advanced user with 450 mail boxes, 85,000 messages, about 15 personalities, 100 filters and tons of stationery and signatures. I really do promote eudora and having so much invested in it I did not want to risk loosing the format of massages that I have compiled since 1998. What is nice is that even the 7.1 version of eudora is fully compatible with messages created in 1998.

So is the idea to make an open source Eudora called Penelope or to incorporate the best features of Thunderird and Eudora and make one email product.

Here is what I use daily and how I would like to tweak it. Some of these suggestions I have made before to the eudora team but they never when anywhere

I really like the personality change feature and really like the ability to edit the outgoing address on the fly

I really need the relay ability as verizon does not let me use other email severs to send out my domain mail. 360971

I really love the faster eudora X1 searching and note that my stand alone x1 search interface will work with eudora but I still use the eudora interface. Perhaps those need to be melded together better

I need the ability to group filters into folders and I have many filters for one client that has many associated subjects (like the third party filter editor out there )

Stationery and signatures work fine but I would like to imbed images into a signature

Embedding photos into eudora works fine, but sometimes stuff imbedded into outlook and sent to me does not work. The viewer should be based on Firefox 2.0 and not IE

One huge pet peeve is that when I send HTML mgs to Older Lotus Notes users they cannot see any text or attachments unless I send it in plain text to all recipients

Another note. You need to incorporate all the best features out of the outlook address book into eudora and make it more compatible with systems that use outlook address books so that I could use the address book more. I use excell databases for long email lists so I can sort them better. May want to look into that. Like complex sorting, such as sorting by interests or job categories or zip codes. In other words full database functionality for usefulness beyond eudora. Perhaps some open source stuff from mozilla can be plugged in. I do like the way you can freely paste many addresses into the address book at once and also paste email addresses from excell into the bcc or to field in eudora. A nice feature outlook used was a plain text check box for address book recipients that can only see plain text. The boss watch check box is a nice touch in eudora.

The address book auto completion drop down list is also a keeper

I like composing off line and like how it can send under multiple address simultaneously

I like the small size of the program and the files as it allows me to easily synchronize may lap top and back up hard drives quickly and easily

Things I would like to see:

Why dont you add a feature that will allow you to store attachments in a directory path you choose for messages filtered to a specific mailbox. Each mailbox would get its own attachment folder wherever you want to put it. I have hundreds of mailboxes and it is very hard to keep track of thousands of attachments in one single file. I guess the attachments could work under the filter list. All incoming attachments that go with messages into the smith eudora folder will automatically go into C:/mydocuments/smith file/ or what ever path you select. Sort of like how outgoing attachments are handles now. Maybe you could do the same thing for the messages themselves. Allow each to sort to a folder in a specific place on your hard drive.

I would like to see more useful/helpful descriptions on how to fix problems once errors arise on sending or receiving etc.

Here is a list of things I could do without:

Moodwatch ESP Stats Pure voice

Let us know when there is al alpha out there to test and I will duplicate my eudora in another folder and see how the conversion process works

Two Login Names

I agree with all the requests to keep the email file structure, which I have found very easy to work with for filing emails and to move to new accounts.

My suggestion, which I have not seen mentioned, is to implement separate Login names for receiving and sending mail. Although virtually all mail account providers make using Eudora in POP3 mode simple, most do not provide sendmail capability or require the use of the account login name to send emails. My DSL connections will not send mail unless sent with the DSL login. My current email host, GoDaddy, requires that Login to the POP account be accessed with the entire email address (ecgomez@domain.com) rather than just the user name; so does my current DSL provider (ecgomez@sbcglobal.net) and the two requirements are incompatible.

Having a separate Login name for sending and receiving would solve this problem and avoid switching personalities, etc. If one has one's own domain, a simple user name such as "Ed" can be used, but such a name is not available on a large domain, such as sbcglobal.net, which one would use to send emails.

I can think of no obvious disadvantage to the separate Login names except the trivial requirement that they both be filled in, even if they are the same.

Ed Gomez

Screen real estate

Besides all the good points that have already been made here I would like to add:

Screen real estate

One of the things I have always loved about Eudora is the amount of emails I can squeeze into a smallish screen (In my case a PowerBook 15.4"). Eudora is one of the few applications that is still very conservative when it comes to screen real estate. The listings are so compact that you get a really get a good overview of the contents of your inbox. I love it!

Okey, screen resolutions are getting better and better and pixel dimensions larger and larger. But I would like to use those extra pixels to display even more emails and not to display fancy anti-aliased text.

Given that a lot of people here seem to use Eudora to handle large amounts of email I think this is critical. The choice of typeface and the legibility in small sizes of that typeface is definently going to affect my choice of email client for the coming years.

Sent Attachments and Images

This is a feature request. It concerns retention of sent attachments and embedded images. I often grab a portion of my screen as a png or jpg to include in an email when reporting bugs and such to various software vendors.

With Eudora, when I send an email with embedded or attached images (or attached files) I often want to se what I sent to someone but the embedded images, for whatever reason, are not retained. When I later open one of these sent emails, it may display the sent images but mostly it does not. I have no way to review what I sent. The outgoing email contains a broken image tag and revealing the source shows: <img src="x-eudora-file:P574EFFD9"> or similar. This makes it impossible to see what it was that I sent.

[davidmorr: In the mailbox view, there is a column for attachments. When the message is selected, the attachment icon becomes a popup menu which allows you to open the attachments sent with the e-mail.]

In Penelope, I'd like to see a folder just for keeping archival copies of attached/embedded content such that I can open a sent email later and see the images I sent.

Sometimes embedded images are dragged to the message composition window from whatever folder contains them, other times, they are just pasted in from the clipboard. Either way, Penelope should retain a copy somewhere so that I have a record of what I sent.

For content that is dragged to the composition window, Penelope can remember the path to the content or (optionally) make a copy of that content. Perhaps an X-penelope-setting can determine which. For pasted-in content, however, Penelope should save a copy of it somewhere permanently (until the original sent email is deleted).

BLAH BLAH/Editing, Plain Text/HTML

BLAH BLAH/Editing Penelope needs to retain the BLAH BLAH button for viewing message source and also the pencil button to be able to edit the content of received emails. I use these features A LOT in order to trim messages for archiving. I keep a lot of list postings and such for later reference and the quick availability of editing is crucial. Some mailers hide the ability to view the source where it is not convenient. I don't know if other mailers allow the ability to edit received content, but this is something I'd definitely like to see retained.

Along the same lines, the ability to edit the message subject as it appears in the mailbox window is also essential. Definitely keep this Eudora feature.

Web Bugs/JavaScript Retain also the option to NOT automatically download images from the web! These are often web bugs and I like to remove these using the ability to edit messages before I use the Open In Browser function in the current Eudora. [Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

I'm guessing that at some point Penelope will not use the 'Open in Browser' function to view html messages. I hope that when it does the rendering itself, we'll retain the ability to NOT download content that's out on the Internet. Perhaps there could be a button in the message window to display such content, if the option to not display it automatically has been set. [Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

Perhaps there needs to be an option to not execute JavaScript code in html messages as well.[Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

Plain Text/HTML I'd like to see a setting which allows the user to choose which content to display when a message arrives with both plain text and html. Currently, most mailers discard the less sophisticated content (the plain text version) and display the html version. I would prefer the ability to view the plain text version rather than the html version when a message arrives with both types. Currently, Eudora discards the plain text version of the message. I'd like this to be a user-set option so that those of us who prefer plain text can view email that way whenever possible.[Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

The wish list of a 12 years user of Eudora

I'm a Mac user using Eudora since 1994. Here is the list of the features I especially appreciate and need in this software:

1. The quick search filter is a key component. I have about 16'000 e-mails stored since 1994 and the rapid finding of any of them with the Boolean search tool is essential.359311

2. The format of the e-mail boxes (as simple text files!). This helped me a lot when I crashed my HD last year. I retrieved my recent e-mail messages with a forensic software scanning for text-files and just had to cut and paste this messages in the Eudora box files I had backuped the week before.

3. The fact that the attachments files are located in a disctinct folder.359319

4. The personality system is very neat (including the relay personality).

5. Ability to display every mailboxes and messages in separate windows.

6. The ability to "redirect" instead of "forwarding" e-mails.

7. The spell checker.

8. The Nicknames expansion.

9. The simple visual interface to determine which boxes contains unread messages (by underlining the name).

10. The very complete settings panes.

11. The possibility to edit every message (even the ones in the Inbox !) with the "pen" tool.

12. The easy way to see every details of a message with the "BLAH BLAH" icon.

13. The Junk system is easy to use and works fine.

14. The "chili pepper" system is useful, especially when sending e-mails.

15. The stats system.

Moreover, here are just the additional features that could be useful in Penelope from my point of view (for Mac users):

1. Better HTML rendering (using the built in features of OS X).

2. Unicode support.

3. Possibility of starting Penelope with various "profiles". I have indeed two Eudora folders: one with my various private e-mails accounts (various "personalities") and one with my work e-mails. I want them to be totally separated, but a profile manager would be great to choose between "private" and "work" when launching the program.

4. OS X Address book total integration.

5. Universal binary.

Thanks! Nic (Nwidmer 10:48, 24 October 2006 (PDT); http://www.nwidmer.ch/)

Release 0.1: Please let Penelope import itself, too

With Release 0.1, where importers are created - presumably for Eudora and Thunderbird, in addition to other email programs - it would be great if Penelope could import its own mail and other data that it has previously stored.

This would make it very easy for me to migrate all my stored mails and adresses from my old to my new computer, without having to know all the details on where this data is actually hiding. For example, I could connect my old machine (with Penelope and its data installed on it) to the Intranet and open its partitions for reading. Then install Penelope on the new machine and simply Import my data from the old machine, by clicking on the "File>Import..." menu option and selecting "Penelope" from the list of email programs. Ideally, Penelope on my new machine would then go out and quickly find my old data and copy it into an "Old" folder in its database.

Since Penelope knows itself better than it knows other email programs and data formats, this might be fairly straightforward to implement.

PS: Thanks Eudora!

A couple of thoughts

1) UTF-8 -> it NEEDS to be done and it needs to be on top of the list!

2) Keep the independent addressbook-location(s) We have Eudora with a centrally administered address book on the server. This is missing in TB. On the other hand: Improve the handling of changed address books. If I change a central address book, Those Eudoras that are already open will allways get "confused" and display a erroneous addressbook.

3) It may be needed to display Full HTML (with the security options like no downloading from the web, no javascript/active content) but please let us choose the engine. It shouldn't be only MSIE![Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

3b) Not every HTML content is supposed/wanted to be displayed. Instead of an all-or nothing approach, there could be a button in each mail to display html version when text-only obiously is incomplete or whatever. Also, why not make it a Mailbox-based option. One can use filters (please keep!) to have those mails KNOWN to be HTML and trustworthy (certain newsletters) moved into a mailbox which has standard option "display HTML".

4) How about multiple attachment folders? Something like one default and (if set) one for each mailbox or at least mail folder). Also, the attachment folders should be allowed to be anywhere (same as with the address books)

5) Data: Please keep it simple. Right now, even from win 2K to XP or Win98 to XP I only have to copy (yes, COPY) the Eudora-Folder to the new system (and maybe network-folders/address books if any). No installation, no import, no hassles!

6) Built-in (or plugin) support to decode the abymsal winmail.dat often sent by incompetent Outlook-Users

Main feature that kept me using Eudora

Open window memory.

Eudora keeps track of all open windows and their positions, and is able to re-open everything when restarting after the application/system quits or crashes. All other email clients will only re-open the main paneled window.

While I'm here, I'll also state the main thing that has me searching for another client.

Crappy attachments handling

I now have a directory full of attachments belonging to emails long ago deleted. I can't figure out which attachments belong to current mails and which attachments should have been deleted a long time ago. Furthermore, if an attachment of the same name is in another mail, Eudora will rename it! This means that an exchange of mails discussing and amending an attachment will lead you to have a whole set of attachments of essentially the same file with different names, and you end up mailing a document that wasn't the same name when you started! Please fix this in Penelope.

Keep the old icons

I hate the new icons in the newer Eudora builds and reverted them back to the old icons. They are very good and clear, please don't forget to add them in the penelope project.

The GUI used in eudora is the only GUI for mail clients which does what I want, I hope you guys succeed in porting the feeling of the GUI (fast, pleasant to the eyes, clear, etc.)

Oh and don't forget the splash screen, I love the splash screens.

Also the minimize to tray function in the newest release is crap, I want a 1-click option (click with left-mouse-button on the tray icon and *BAM* instant eudora).

And is it too much to ask for the Eudora name, it sounds so much better than penelope.

Keep separate mail boxes and filters

My I.P. provides just 2 e-mail addresses per account. Eudora allows me to: a) use just one for my entire family where with Apples mail, I have to get (pay for)more e-mail addresses, and b) Apple Mail filtering is not very rich.

When I travel, It is simple to drag the particular project mail boxes I might need onto a memory stick for use on the road.

I have used Eudora for years, I am an old fart, and do not want to change!

Kent

PS Also, please continue the silly and inane (and humanizing) comments like the "statue" you will erect in my honour should I register, or your description of complex headers as "Blah, Blah, Blah" etc... 360981

Yet another wishlist

Been using Eudora for many years. Like others, I have thousands of emails in hundreds of mailboxes, several hundred fiters etc. Agree with most points above, but wanted to add:

(1) Can we get a timestamp on when an email was recieved on my machine, as well as when it was sent 360982

(2) Can we keep better track of which attachments belong with which emails, particularly to help me delete or archive old attachments

(3) Get rid of the out of memory bug that crashes Eudora if I am running any big optimisation models at the same time on the same machine and get low on memory

I understand that it is hard to keep compatible with the old mbox format and add these, but I am sure you all are quite inventive and creative... the simple file format and separate files for each mailbox make backups much cleaner, and I do copy from one machine to another quite often.

BTW: What will happen to the paid-mode features like ultrafast search and spamwatch in the open source version?

Tim

Echoed Wishes

Per Tim's wishes - I second the second one...

"Can we keep better track of which attachments belong with which emails, particularly to help me delete or archive old attachments"

This used to be in Eudora Mac under System 9 and below. It was one of the things that kept me running System 9 for so long. I get so many attachements, it was such a relief to be able to look in the Finder's "Get Info" window and look at the comments to see who the attachment was from - even when Eudora wasn't running.

-Kelter

The Absolute Eudora Users

I tend to be pessimistic about certain programs' being revamped. Especially if the 'new' developers are basically non-users of them. I can envision this now: The Penelope developers are salivating over sweeping changes to 'prove' their software engineering expertise upon us hapless users. We thousands of long time Eudora users (I, for a decade or so) chose Eudora Pro and kept-on using Eudora Pro/Paid, even after sampling from time-to-time most of the 'others' out there, because of entirely what Eudora consists-of.

For one thing, why a name change? Perhaps this name change has to do with Qualcomm's copyright of the name Eudora? Oh well, Penelope it is.

Among the many desired previously mentioned features about Eudora, the method and usage of the Label features are superb. So is the Blah-Blah, Filters, and Personalities, as well as ALL of those Eudora Look & Feel aspects. As one person mentioned, 'We don't need another rendition of that (clunky) MS Office Outlook', nor any of it's many clunky clones, I might add. I already have Outlook 2003 and compared to Eudora, it absolutely stinks.

Yes, I have installed and used Thunderbird. As a long time (Paid) Eudora user, I say this: 'You gotta be kidding. No way does T'bird hold a candle to Eudora!'. I highly recommend THIS suggestion:

Keep Eudora exactly the way it is, and simply rename it 'Penelope', or whatever. As in the past make only necessary improved changes as needed for any future upgrades. If that too is a potential Qualcomm copyright infringement, then unfortunately those many unique Eudora attributes along with it's fantastic Look and Feel' will surely soon disappear.

Meanwhile I strongly suspect that we long time Eudora users will have to keep using Eudora 7.1 until Windows Vista no longer will except any of our future re-installations of it. Unfortunately even that may happen soon.

-John

From a developers perspective

I wanted to weigh into the future development of Penelope with my perspective. I have made a number of setup/install applications using [NSIS http://nsis.sourceforge.net] that automates the deployment, management and cleanup of Eudora installs. These custom installs would not have been possible if Eudora did not store settings in the current INI format. I hope to see the continuation of the eudora.ini settings format carried onto Penelope.

I currently use Eudora and IMP webmail for work and Thunderbird, Yahoo Mail and Gmail for my personal E-mail. The web based E-mail clients have distinct advantages that both Thunderbird and Eudora cannot compete with. It is my suggestion that Penelope focus development on features that these web based clients can't do well or at all.

Both Thunderbird vs Eudora bring great things to the Penelope table. I have used IMAP in Thunderbird and it works great. This is a feature that Eudora greatly needs improved upon. Thunderbird also has a nice array of extensions/ad-ons.

One very important feature I would like to see remain is the ExtraNicknamesDir setting. We utilize this feature at work to share a set of address books among multiple computers.359320 The only other way to achieve this is to use LDAP. I don't want to start a LDAP discussion, but LDAP is not the best solution for maintaining shared contacts. In reality, there should be something better for managing/sharing contacts.

New Feature Proposed: Shared Contacts Protocol

What I would like to see is a new protocol that would allow for managing contact information from your E-mail client to a central server. Here are some guidelines for this new protocol that would make it ideal:

Use XML-RPC, this would allow the server side to manage the actual storage of the contact information in almost any fashion.
Use HTTP Authentication, you could setup your server to use the same username/password for E-mail or setup a guest login that has only read access, etc...
Encourage services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail to adopt this protocol. This would allow you to store your contacts in your Gmail account and still use/manage them from your E-mail client (Penelope).

If others think this is a good idea, drop me a line: angelo [at] mandato [dot] com. If you are a wiki administrator and think this topic is worthy, please link to a new wiki page.

-Angelo

I am not a developer, but a long time user of Eudora.

I added to this message as it contained thoughts similar to mine about IMAP and the two clients.

I moved to IMAP and found Eudora unable to cope with this. I had to stop using it. I now find Thunderbird does this well for me in several locations and mobile devices. It seems others have had the same experience. There are features of later Eudora releases I now miss in Thunderbird. I hope Penelope can develop with the same sound IMAP functionality plus features of Eudora.

Hooks for External Spam Filtering (e.g. SpamSieve)

My understanding is that SpamSieve does not function with Thunderbird, currently, because no hooks are provided to do so. I'm simply unwilling to use a mailreader at this point that does not support SpamSieve. Therefore, I'd like to see Penelope support third-party spam filters, such as SpamSieve, and do so in a *full* manner, as opposed to the way that Eudora does it, which, as I understand, doesn't pass on much information at all about embedded images that can be a useful part of spam filtering, too. 360984

Internationalize it!

Not one of the first priority things but a very nice thing to have.

Make it international. I know Eudora has been featuring that, but it has always been buggy on my machines, no matter what version of Eudora I used.

So these are my suggestions:

flawless handling of international charsets
ability to use multiple dictionaries for spell checking and toggle between them or link them to certain stationaries
implementation of existing open source dictionaries (e.g. OpenOffice)
multi-language UI (not too important, but probably easy to implement)
spell check on the fly (nice to have :-)

Other than that, a big thanks to the Eudora team for providing a great email client for so many years and I hope we see the key features mentioned by all the other users in Penelope again.

Multiple dictionaries

Most HTML tags allow for LANG attribute to define the natural language (i.e. English/French/Chinese etc.) of their contents. Use this mechanism to define the language on the message or part of it, then apply appropriate spell checkers. --Funfilder 14:29, 11 November 2006 (PST)

Rules Engine

I have used Eudora on Windows for many years, and its ability to filter has been key.

I typically use POP and transfer everything into my local inbox. I do not filter the incoming or outgoing POP messages; I set the filter to Manual only. I then select all messages in my local inbox, then "Filter messages".

I use spambayes (sb_service.exe) as a POP proxy, which adds email headers to indicate whether it thinks a message is spam/ham/unsure. I filter the SPAM into a separate mbox, which I can later examine and used to train spambayes. I have about 250 other filters.

It would be nice to have a rule engine or capability that can add an email header with a folksonomy tag. The ability to group messages by tag would be nice even if the messages are in different mbox's but use the same tag.

After I run my filters, the inbox is empty and all the messages have been moved or copied into other mbox's. I sometimes want to go into one of these mbox's and further filter that set of messages, but since Eudora has only the one set of filters, I may need to hack at the filters to do what I want. It would be nice to have a set of filters. My initial filtering of inbox would use one set. When I want to further filter another mbox, I would use another set. I would want a way to quickly pick which filter set I want to use. Currently I use the a "Filter Messages" button on a toolbar. Perhaps the ability to have a toolbar button where it is "Filter Messages using Set #1" would do the trick.

So I like the filtering that Eudora has provided, but perhaps there is a way to reuse a more powerful rules engine in Penelope.

I really hope Penelope has a tool to migrate my 250+ Eudora rules to whatever filtering language it uses.

Lexpauld

Alt Click

Alt-click on sender, subject, label, ... any column is a great feature and I use it all the time. Please do not lose this capability. 359267

Lexpauld

Moving Attachments

Eudora parses a message, strips out the attachments and puts them into a designated folder (Windows). Over time, this folder grows and grows. Periodically I move files out of that folder into a different folder (perhaps on CD or DVD). Eudora then can't find the attachment. It would be nice to have a way to tell Eudora that the attachments folder for a set of messages has changed, perhaps using a URI rather than a pathname (e.g., in case the attachments are stored somewhere accessible from HTTP).

Lexpauld

Follow up:

Yes I like this idea above. The ability to move attachements with msgs as the messages change mailboxes. I am not a programmer but was thinking that one solution would be to use the eudora filters to filter all attachments just like other msgs. All messages that go to the eudora "smith folder or mailbox" also filters all the attachments into c:/mydocuments/clients/acmeco/smith-matter for example. Now when you change the smith folder or rename it in windows explorer or change the eudora mailbox then there is a problem. Not sure how to fox that.

Signed Another Poster

Another followup: I definitely agree. The fact that you can't move attachments without killing the link to the email is a major pain in Eudora. My 10-year-old attachments folder is humungous and unwieldy. Every spam attachment I've ever received is in there. A simple improvement would be to allow a parallel structure of attachments to messages, so that when you move a message to the junk folder, for example, the associated attachment moves from a (new) "inbox attachments" folder to a (new) "junk attachments" folder automatically, so it can be easily deleted. -- A third poster

Portable Application

I am a LONG time user of Eudora but recently I have been using Thunderbird Portable (TBP) and love the ability to have an email client on a USB stick. While I use Eudora on my main desktop PC, I find it necessary for me to send and receive mail throughout the day while away from my main desktop PC. TBP is no Eudora, but it is an acceptable substitute because of its portable nature.

I would very much like to see a portable version of Penelope. So, please... modify Eudora in such a way that it does not write to the Windows Registry and make sure all DLL files reside within the application directory. Please use relative path names don't use specific drive letter mappings.

-Neil

My 2 wishes: Database and threads

Hi
I am a long time Eudora user. I get about 4,000 emails a day and Eudora is having problems with that. My fix is
1. Create an option to store the emails in a real database like SQL server or any ODBC capable format. My inbox and folders gets scrambled occasionally which makes it impossible to tell which messages were read. Wastes many hours. I have to manually compact my mailboxes many times a day.

2. The UI isn't responsive when downloading a lot of mail. I would create either a new thread or a completely differently program to download the mail, and a seperate thread or program to allow me to read it

thanks

Just to add support to these two ideas.

We don't get that many emails a day, but it is several hundreds most days, and we also have to keep manually compacting mailboxes. Our boxes only seem to get scrambled when Eudora crashes with "out of memory" errors or similar if we are doing intensive processing at the same time, but it is hideous to sort out when it happens. A good database implementation for mailboxes could have real advantages for some of us in terms of performance, scalability and stability.

Multithreading is going to grow in importance with the appearance of so many more multi-core chips. We might as well make use of them...

Tim

Thoughts on Eudora

Many of these have already been mentioned but here are my thoughts to this point:

--> There is very little, if anything, in the current Mac version of Eudora that I would eliminate. Primarily, I would add/improve features.

--> Keep the multiple windows, like the current Mac version, rather than a single window with multiple panes. Multiple windows allows for more individual flexibility. Adding the **option** to use a single-window, multiple-pane view would be nice.

--> I like the option to use a preview pane and the ability to quickly turn that on and off using the arrow in the bottom left of a pane is really nice.

--> Add accurate html rendering.

--> Provide live access to the Mac address book -- add, delete, edit Address Book entries from within Eudora as well as reflect changes made within Address Book

--> Continue ability to use tabbed windows like the current Mac version

--> Continued strong support for multiple mail accounts/personalities. Eudora is much easier to use in this respect than Mail, Entourage, Outlook or any other e-mail client I've ever used. Because of some mailing lists that I manage, I currently have 38 personalities set up.

--> Add additional filtering arguments -- two is insufficient

--> Retain option-click grouping for "Who" and "Subject" -- extend to other fields such as read/unread, attachments, importance level

--> Improve import/export capability for both mail and addresses for a variety of other e-mail clients. Export for addresses is less important if there is tight integration with the Mac Address Book.

--> Keep the statistics -- tweak a bit to make clearer. For instance, in sent-mail stats, have the first be Total Mail Sent with sub-stats for New Mail Generated, Reply-to, Forwarded, Redirected, Sent Again, etc.

--> ABSOLUTELY keep the Redirected function.359226

--> Select and quote non-contingent text in both replies and forwards would be a helpful feature.

--> Retain the ability to change to text-only on the fly. Because a number of the people with whom I correspond live overseas in places where e-mail is expensive, I can save them (and our organization) money by sending text-only e-mail.

--> Add contextual menus

Bob Allen

Tool Tips

Adding in Tool Tips for all the various features of Eudora would go a long way to helping new and intermediate users get up to speed with all of the functionality of Eudora.

A Few Key Points

Like many others, I've used Eudora since the early 1990s, primarily on Windows. What I do for a living puts my email addresses out there, and I get many thousands of messages a day. Eudora is the only package that can cope with that. Here are the reasons why I use Eudora:

1. Personalities. It's a tough feature to describe, but a very powerful one that lets you manage your email through the use of multiple addresses.

2. The ability to display multiple mailboxes, and to filter both inbound *and* outbound messages to those mailboxes. This makes it easy to capture both sides of an email thread in one mailbox. Most other emailers can only capture mail sent to you that way. To explain this another way, my In mailbox receives very little mail. I use a combinations of filters that identify personalities (and other factors) to identify all the mail that's sent to me and sort them to folders that frequently have people names or company names. The mail folders that matter open up automatically.

3. Separating attachments from messages in the mail store, and the simple text nature of Eudora mailbox files. I love the fact that I can send mailbox files to another Eudora user who can then drop those mailboxes in his or her Eudora installation and open the messages they contain.

Those are three of my required features, but there are many things about Eudora that have been begging for improvement for years:

1. While I think many of us like having a lot more than three windows, a better window management system would be a boon.

2. The configuration settings are a mess. That should just be ripped up and started all over. Let's get rid of things that don't matter, and add UI for newer things, like SMTP auth, and so on, that do.

3. The address book is very weak.

4. Third-party plug-ins support could use help, and better outbound communication to those developers.

5. The X1 search is nice and fast, but its index is gigantic.

6. Many of the best features in Eudora aren't very discoverable. The user interface is quirky at best. We all know it and don't think twice about it, but most people who try it these days absolutely hate it.

7. I love the mail-filtering rules; my installation has literally hundreds of them and they've saved me hours and hours of time by storing things for me that I didn't need to read now, and making sure I saw things I absolutely needed to see. We need more than two data variables, though. Three would be better.

8. Eudora's HTML support is weak. When you forward an HTML message, it breaks down to rich text. HTML support should be an option. But those who use it deserve better support than Eudora currently offers.

Eudora has enormous potential. It needs to be easier to learn how to use while retaining its power.

Phoning home

It is possible to disable "Phoning home"? Spam messages often have a URL which contains ones email address. If one opens such a message, Eudora will fetch the URL and thus validate your email address to the spammer. Pstudier 14:11, 4 November 2006 (PST)

ANSWER:

The Current Eudora allows you to prevent phoning home:

Windows Eudora: Tools->Options->Display, Uncheck 'Automatically download HTML graphics'

Mac Eudora: Special->Settings->Fonts & Display, Uncheck 'Automatically download HTML graphics'

Thunderbird, and thus Penelope also allows you to block this type of thing. In the 'General' section of the 'Privacy' settings, see the 'Block loading of remote images in mail messages' option. Mdudziak

Thanks for the suggestion, but if one uses the Microsoft's Viewer under Viewing Mail, this does not stop phoning home. If one does not use this, then HTML does not come out right at all. Surely, an email client could make a distinction between HTML in the message and additional HTML that has to be fetched. Pstudier 23:04, 18 November 2006 (PST)

Best reasons I stay with Eudora

Definite "keep" features that keep me using Eudora (for many years, currently with 62,000 messages in over 420 mailboxes, 25 personalities):

1. Ability to use "pencil" to edit text in received message

2. Ability to edit incoming subject line is VERY useful, especially when this is able to be used as a sort feature

3. Multiple personalities -- ability to use them, also change on the fly for outbound messages

4. Filter to change personality depending on various incoming settings and use that personality in replies

5. Super-fast indexed searching

6. Attachment file handling in separate folder; also like ability to rename/specify location of attachment directory 359319

7. Eudora mailbox handling is obvious as it is and easy to backup

8. Like ability to edit some Eudora files if required (eg RCPdbase.txt, eudora.ini) to fix any display discrepencies (eg, when Eudora recipient list includes address book entries that were previously deleted)

9. "Redirect" by-way-of option, although I see there is a Thunderbird extension for this

10. UI tweaking to be able to directly edit "from" address etc.

11. Blah Blah button to inspect full mail header

12. Use nickname of multiple recipient address book entry as display in "to" field for all recipients, hiding email addresses.

Annoyances

a. Reinstate ability for pop-up Attachment window to be re-sized in standard windows interface, when exploring folders/files for attaching a file to an email message! This is extreme UI annoyance.

b. Ability to edit quote prefix characters/positioning, and intro text

c. Right-click anywhere on a task in progress to stop that task. Yin/yang symbol "stop all tasks" not a suitable replacement for feature that was implemented better in earlier versions of Eudora

Features on my wishlist...

A. Better handling of message formatting and display when forwarding HTML formatted messages. This is currently awful and seems to work abysmally. I forward a HTML message and it instantly loses much of its formatting. Both Thunderbird and MS products do much better in this regard. This is a product-killer for me and is very nearly a reason to stop using Eudora, despite features I love (above).

B. Separate SMTP/POP settings in each personality as a separate selection: eg when creating the SMTP setting have an option to choose a pre-defined setting or manual entry -- like personalities but for SMTP/POP. Then updates can just be made easily to particular "SMTP/POP personality". This would extend on the "use relay personality if defined" option to be able to define common SMTP/POP settings. Eg, if I have 12 personalities all with a particular ISPs outgoing SMTP setting, and then change ISP, all 12 have to be edited manually -- would rather just update "SMTP personality setting" to the new info.

C. Increased ability to use labels beyond current color scheme and limit of 7 options; perhaps with use of 16x16 pixel .png icons like favicons in web environment.

D. Like Thunderbird's blocking of HTML content (like Google mail) in incoming messages, allowing me to manually override or set filter/automatic override.

E. Handling of multiple attachments at once. Often I move/copy attachments to other places on a network (eg, sent five photos, all need to be copied to network photo assets folder -- currently have to either (a) explore the attachments folder outside of Eudora interface, or (b) manually complete one-by-one within Eudora. Would like a checkbox feature next to attachment filename to be able to perform move/copy/delete the selected attachments.

F. Google-style message content preview on subject line would be a nice option.

G. Seeing as it's a wishlist (dreaming here), would LOVE to see Mach5 Mailer type "merge" feature -- ability to send multiple recipient personalized messages that have personalized subject line, message content (plain-text and html) and also attachment list on individual message basis. Data source may be based on entries in the address book, a linked ODBC database or spreadsheet. However, I think this is a major departure from standard usage of Eudora and would happily keep using Mach5 Mailer as a separate product. But hey, it's a wishlist. Even basic personalization would be a good integrated add-on. 360989

S/MIME, S/MIME, S/MIME

I had to move several of my Mac users from Eudora to T-bird simply because of the ability to sign and encrypt e-mail. If this is brought over from Windows Eudora 7.1 to Penelope for all platforms, I can move them back!!

Eudora 7 with the S/MIME plugin is able to deal with signed messages, but there are a lot of operations to do just to read a signed message. Why use an attachment that we have to decode ? In most cases, we are interested by the message itself, not the signature. So why not to display the message with an advice about the verified (or unverified) signature ?

What kept me from switching to Tbird

I have tried a while ago to switch to Tbird, but it lacked some features important to me and had to give up. So now I run Eudora+wine:

SMTP settings per account/personality. Tbird is simply broken here.

Ability to switch personality for outgoing emails.

Dockable panes. I _need_ my email boxes at right.

The directory structure, including folder for decoded attachements.

Plain text mboxes. Too bad the mbox format is slightly modified from standard, but it works fine. (ok, Tbird is plain text too).

Multiple Recipients

Penelope should retain Eudora's ability to use a nickname (mailing list) and optionally not expand the the nickname in the To: field. This can not only maintain the privacy of those on the list, but can prevent a To: field that runs many pages. That is especially annoying when there are a lot of recipients but the message itself is very small. --Hapster 14:03, 8 November 2006 (PST)

[I tried editing my previous comment and something went wrong. Sorry for any confusion.]

developer ready to help

I'd like to join the open source effort around Eudora. I wrote to Steve Dorner (on the Eudora page it suggested writing to one of the existing team members) but haven't heard back; maybe I got filtered as spam :)

Anyway, if some of you are reading this, ping me (eudora at glennreid dot com) and we can talk. Here's the note I sent to Steve:

Hi Steve,

I've been using Eudora for a long, long time (and paying for it, of course :)). Nice job, by the way. I'm a big fan, and even have my Mom using Eudora (she's 81 and has a sweet 17" PowerBook).

I'm also a very experienced app developer (Apple's iMovie and iPhoto are probably my best-known work). I'd like to help with the development of the open-source Eudora. I'm mostly a Mac guy these days but quite proficient on Windows and UNIX as well. I'm good at cross-platform architectures, low-level TCP/IP networking, protocols, building usable apps, all kinds of stuff that will probably come in handy.

I'm working at Adobe Systems nowadays in the Advanced Technology Group but I don't think there's a any conflict in my working on Eudora in my spare time, so if you need/want some help, I'd love to get involved.

Glenn Reid

Keep the possibility to have mailboxes at random locations

I love this Eudora feature. Just 2 uses:

I have the mailboxes with confidential contents on an encrypted disk image (Mac).

I have made the mailboxes of my boss to appear within the Eudora of his secretary: just set up the read-only access onto the folder containing his mailboxes and bound them into her Eudora account. --Funfilder 11:36, 11 November 2006 (PST)

Editing incoming mails and adding notes

Possibility to edit incoming mails is a useful feature of Eudora. E.g., I would replace a PGP "garbage" by the decrypted text, or just correct some contents. However, it would be always nice to know what was exactly in the original mail.

Here my proposal how to have your cake and eat it, too: Editing a mail creates a copy of it. Just a line is added to header of the original mail, looking like "X-Penelope-EditedCopy: location=XYZ". In the mail browser, you may select between the original and the edited copy. The same mailbox would be a reasonable place to keep the edited copy.

Now, you see that technically, the edited copy is just some text linked to the original message. In the same way, it should be possible to attach any text to the message: that is, notes. --Funfilder 12:47, 11 November 2006 (PST)

Customize incoming mail display

Current Eudora has the "When receiving styled mail, pay attention to" settings. These save my sanity all the time! Crazy Outlook users send emails in pink color, weird fonts, microscopic size, whatever all the time -- an insult to the eyes. Eudora just gets rid of the crap and displays this text in its default style. This feature should be kept. Maurits 14:17, 11 November 2006 (PST)

Filter and search enhancements; smart folders

Though Eudora filtering capabilities may be superior to other programs, there is a lot of room for improvement. Here are some ideas (which would actually equally apply to Thunderbird):

Every filter allows unlimited number of conditions. For managing multiple conditions, I like how they implemented it in ChronoSync (a file synchronization software for Mac, shareware). There are three type of interface: simple - all conditions with either AND, or OR matching, then intermediate, with a graphic interface and possibility to group conditions, and then advanced, allowing for any Boolean expressions.

A filter can depend on another filter as a condition, like "If (filter 'business partner' is triggered) AND (subject: contains 'meeting')... "

The filter browser shows all filters ordered by execution order or according to other attributes. Filters can be combined into groups. Filters can be searched. Filters or filter groups can be de-activated. Filters allow for multiple actions.

Some filters can be stored in a different place. In this way, it would be possible to put some filters centrally on a server to be used by everybody in the organization. (Storing filters in a XML file would enable having some parts in a different place; probably a local cache to improve speed and for the case of server unavailability).

Among the attributes of a filter are filter name, creation, last change, and "last triggered" dates, possible comments, Incoming/Outgoing/Manual, label...

If a certain filter has been triggered on a message, include information about this event into a header, like "X-Penelope-FiltersTriggered: 'business partner', 'meeting', 'XY company' date='2008-01-01 12:05' ". (These headers should be of cause automatically stripped on forwarding the mail)

Search and filters integration

As filtering and searching are very similar actions, the interface should also be similar/integrated. Searching using previously defined filters and saving search as a filter should be possible. Applying a filter or filter group to search results should be possible.

Smart folders

With information in the message headers about filter or search triggered on each message, it should be possible to have smart folders Mac-style (saving search as a smart folder). Indexing message headers could be useful (presumably easier to implement then indexing everything like in Eudora 7). --Funfilder 15:04, 11 November 2006 (PST)

Additional suggestions for Eudora -> Penelope

Here a few additional suggestions for the future Penelope

- a "light" version that can be installed on a Palm or a Blackberry and can be used to connect to the POP3 and SMTP servers of the ISP with which the user has subsbcription (there was an Eudora-2-Go, but (i) it worked only with Verizon and in the US...; (ii) I do not see it anymore...);

- the possibility for each personality to have distinct receiving and sending logins (so as to avoid having to use a relay personality, which makes the configuration more compex and, therefore, more difficult to implement by non tech-savy users...);

[Mdudziak: Thunderbird (and thus Penelope) already supports separate configurations for smtp servers, so you can have separate sending/receiving usernames and passwords. This does not, however, alleviate the need for a Relay Personality completely, as users still need a way to say 'I'm at home now, and my home ISP does not allow me to connect out on port 25 to other mail servers, so instead of using the smtp server associated with this account (which requires port 25), use the smtp server associated with my current ISP'.]

I'd also support several other suggestions made in this forum, but mainly

- the possibility to have different folders for the attachments (may be one attachment folder for every mailbox, to avoid having only one, gigantic attachment mailbox with all attachments mixed up ...)

- the possibility to use different langage dictionaries and to easily switch from one to another (as in WORD). This is important for persons who need to use different langages depending on whom they write to ...)

Bornival

Suggestions for new Eudora

- to set the smtp port and pop port for every personalities [Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

- to be able to change name to the personalities [Mdudziak: Thunderbird / Penelope already does this]

- fast indexed search (like x1 search)

Sorting mailboxes

All mail programs allow you to choose which field messages are sorted on in the mailbox window. Some allow you to choose whether they are sorted in ascending or descending order.

Only Eudora, however, seems to allow sorts with multiple criteria. For example, click on the heading of the Who column in the mailbox window. The hold the Shift key and click on the Date heading. Messages will then be sorted by sender, then by date within each sender.

Sometimes this is extremely valuable. davidmorr 20-Nov-2006

More on filters

Just to expand on some earlier comments...

When a filter list gets too long, it is almost impossible to find a given filter, and even to figure out where to add a new one. Some sort of structure would make it much more manageable. One possibility would be a hierarchical structure where filters could be grouped. So I could have groups of filters for managing messages for the various activities I am involved with. For example, I might have something as simple as Home and Work, or I might have more categories such as Tennis, Football, Computer Club, Family History, Frequent Flyers, Clients, Suppliers, etc. Ideally, groups could be nested within groups.

I would like to see the ability to filter messages that have been detected as spam (ie, the spam number is greater than the threshold). At present, they end up in the Junk mailbox without any chance to apply a filter. If the other filters could be run, messages that match a filter should be unmarked as spam and follow the filter action. (I am thinking here of, say, a mailing list, which is filtered into its own mailbox. Even if a message was detected as spam, the filter would put it where it belongs rather than the Junk mailbox.)

Another useful filter would be when you want to do something to existing messages once only. Doing a search to identify the messages, then manually doing the action is certainly possible for some things, eg, setting the label colour for all messages older than a year. But what if you want to forward a bunch of messages to someone without having to forward them individually? A temporary filter could do this easily - select the messages, invoke the temporary filter, set any selection criteria, set the action to Forward, and click Go.

It would probably also be useful to be able to select individual filters from the existing list. For example, if you create a new filter but want to get all the messages that you have already received processed by the filter also. You could select just that filter to be applied.

(Note that if you just create the new filter, then run all filters as at present, there can be unexpected side-effects, eg, where you have changed messages from where the filter initially put them, they will go back to what the filter determined.)

And to finish off, add a filter action to execute a script (AppleScript on Mac) or other application to allow more complex manipulations of e-mail messages. davidmorr 20-Nov-2006

RSS Feed Reader

Thunderbird includes an RSS Feed Reader that manages and displays your rss topics much the same way as e-mail. I'd like to see something like this in a future version of Eudora.

My wishlist: KIS please.

Here's my wish list and comments:

Number one: Keep it Small and Simple. Some people seem to be asking for a very rich client; Thunderbird and other clients already fill that niche well. There is almost nothing I really need that's not in Eudora 3. Liberal use of extensions for non-core features will allow those people to bloat it up, and users like me to have a stripped-down client.

No Newsreader. Please. See number one.

No RSS client. See number one.

No Threading - takes too much horizontal real estate, and isn't that useful when you can't view all sides of the communication (inbox - outbox) at once. Sort by subject is good enough for me. See number one.

Keep the Eudora mailbox file structure/methods, as much as possible. Prefer Eudora TOC methods over X-Mozilla-Status headers.

Attachments Handling: For me, this is the "can't live without" feature of Eudora. I'd be content with the current methodology, but it would be nice to have more sophisticated handling of attachments, so that they could be more easily organized in folders without breaking the links.

Plain Text Oriented: Anything that makes it easier to read and send as plain text is a good thing. If an extension existed to reliably strip HTML formatting from incoming messages, I'd use it.

Portable: shouldn't depend on registry entries, so that you can copy the Penelope folder to another computer, and it works.

Multiple Accounts: I never cared for Eudora's personalities model, and have always used separate instances of Eudora instead. I'll continue that if I can, hopefully without Thunderbird-style profiles. For the all-in-one model, I think Thunderbird accounts work better, so suggest using that instead.

Keep blah blah blah button for extended headers; "view source" should work like Thunderbird.

I like the ability to edit incoming messages, but would like the ability to edit headers too, so I don't have to hack the mailbox file. Example: I get an email from someone whose computer clock is days off. I want to change the date to show when it was actually sent, for proper sorting. Currently, I have to create a junk mailbox, move the message to that mailbox, edit the date outside of Eudora, delete/recreate the TOC, move it back to it's original mailbox, then delete the junk mailbox.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Qualcomm for committing people and resources to this.

request - Stationary

Not finding any reference to it so far -

Really like the way stationary is handled in Eudora.

Wonldn't want to see it forgotten.

Netscape and Mozilla again?

Reading through the suggestions here, there are great features requested to add to the existing Eudora functionality. If implemented, this will make Penelope an even greater e-mail client than Eudora.

However there are also a lot of suggestions that will make Penelope something "much more than" Eudora. The question is - do we really want something much more than Eudora?

Eudora is a great e-mail client. It does nothing else but handle e-mail, and handles it exceptionally.

Many other e-mail clients do other things on the basis that they are "similar to e-mail". Usenet newsgroups is the most common. If this functionality is in such great demand, why are there so many people passionate about continuing to use Eudora when it doesn't do this? Why haven't they changed to another e-mail client ages ago?

There are now requests for things like RSS readers and "Penelope for Blackberry".

Really, these seem to be comments on the poor standard of software to do those things, and wishes for something that works as well for them as Eudora does for e-mail.

But if Penelope is extended to do all these things, with a lot of compromises to keep the task manageable, will it still work well for e-mail? Will it be the "best e-mail client around"?

We don't have to look too far into the past to see examples of trying to do everything in one program - Netscape and Mozilla. It was soon realised that this produced a result that was satisfactory for no-one.

This led to the separation of web browser and e-mail into Firefox and Thunderbird. Ironically, the latter is now being used as the base for Penelope which some people seem to want to build back into Mozilla or Netscape!

There could even be a case for *not* carrying some Thunderbird features over to Penelope in order to simplify the user interface and streamline the code. Usenet news reading is a case in point.

Perhaps this is something that should be listed as a "bug" for people to vote on:

Should Penelope be an e-mail client only, and not do Usenet, RSS, Blackberry, etc?

davidmorr 21-Nov-2006

I agree with this comment - if everything being suggested here is added into the new system, it will probably end up hideously bloated and most people will not use most of the features. Keep it clean and simple if possible, focussed on email and only email, but do it so breathtakingly well that we'll all be delighted with the move.

There is really no reason to include things like RSS and news groups in Eudora - they are different enough that they are better handled by a specific program.

Tim 18th Dec 2006

Add a "sent to" column into the in-box as an optional feature

I would like to suggest a feature, that is missing in Eudora up to now: In the listing of received e-mails I would like to be able to add a new column "sent to". So I am able to see, to which of my email account a specific e-mail was sent to. That would help me to continue having only one "in-box" for more than one e-mail account.

obefritz 21-Nov-2006

[Mdudziak:]Thunderbird (and thus Penelope) already has this feature.

Tourette's Syndrome Eudora

Don't lose x-eudora-setting:319=32. Really.

PGP

It would be nice to have full PGP integration with Penelope. Currently, we only have plaintext PGP functionality through the Services menu in Mac OS X. GnuPG doesn't work so well because of the line ending mismatches. Full PGP/MIME functionality would be greatly appreciated.

Popup menus in mailbox/search result windows

This is something I don't use all that often, but when I do it is extrememly useful.

In the mailbox window, or in the search results window, in Mac Eudora there are columns for various things. Many of them are special. If the message is selected, the entry in the column becomes a popup menu.

In some cases, this allows you to change the value, eg, the message status, priority or label. In other cases, it gives you access to things that are not otherwise accessible.

Two in particular are very useful. If a message has attachments, the icon in the Attachments column reveals a menu with the names of the attachments, and selecting one opens that file. (This is critically important since it is the only way to find out what attachments were sent with the message. The attachments used to appear in the sent message, but for the last few versions, this has disappeared.)

The second is in the search results window, where there is a column for the mailbox. When the message is selected, this becomes a popup menu that shows the hierarchy of folders containing the message. This is very useful if you want to find something else in the same mailbox, or even if you just want to know where the mailbox is located.

So these popup menus are fairly important for efficient use of Eudora.

Thunderbird does not appear to have any similar functionality. Right clicking on a message just gives a contextual menu with pretty much the same options as the Message menu.

davidmorr 23-Nov-2006

Source Code

Is/will the Eudora source code, as provided to Mozilla, be made public for anyone to download.. e.g. for the creation of a spin-off project ? If not can it please be.

[Mdudziak: The _Eudora_ source code will not be made public, at least not in whole. Parts _may_ be incorporated into Penelope and will thus be public as the Penelope project is open source. There is simply too much non-open-source (licensed) code in the Eudora source to release it publicly.]

Junk Folder

One thing that I would like to see is the ability to remove Junk mail sooner, without having to manually select the emails and delete them. Because of problems with my ISP's email filters catching REAL emails, I've had to have them turn off all my spam filtering. Thus, I get 100+ junk emails per day. Eudora is doing a great job of catching them; however, the program rules require Junk folder items to stay at least one day before they can be automatically deleted (or one can use the Delete Old Junk button). I wish I could set it so that the Delete Old Junk button overrides the daily (auto) setting, and immediately clears the folder.

Also, I don't see a compelling reason to send the Junk to the Trash, thus requiring a second step (emptying the Trash). While I understand that some users like or need the extra protection against throwing out valid emails, an option to directly kill Junk would be great.

-Bruce Wahler (drawbars)

[Mdudziak: I think Penelope will already do much of this for you. Thunderbird (Penelope) allows you to set, on a mailbox-by-mailbox basis, how long to retain messages. You have the options of: [ ] Use server defaults

( ) Don't delete any messages

(*) Delete all but the last xx messages

( ) Delete messages more than xx days old

[ ] Always delete read messages

]

Another Nice Feature to retain

I don't think this has been mentioned on this forum yet. I like how Eudora puts the recepient for all _outgoing_ mail in italics when it is moved from the outbox to another folder. I haven't seen this in other email applications (but perhaps I am wrong). I can tell at a glance what I wrote from something that someone else sent to me--Jones in italics means I sent it to Jones, Jones in regular type means Jones sent it to me. This is one of the main reasons I could not continue using Thunderbird or Apple Mail.

[Vote for 359269]

Drag and drop?

There are a few mentions of drag and drop above, but I don't see much about it in the bug list. Am I missing it? I'd like to see Penelope support drag and drop in all the places that Mac Eudora supports it: drag and drop of a closed message to another mailbox and to the desktop, drag and drop of an open message to another mailbox and to the desktop, drag and drop to attach attachments and to copy downloaded attachments to a new location. I believe you can also drag and drop graphics inline into the body of a message, although I don't use this feature myself. I'm sure I'm missing other ways that Eudora Mac uses drag and drop. Are these feasible for Penelope?

What I like and what I would like. (I'm on Eudora for Mac.)

What I like best about Eudora is the structure of it's address book. I love the way it allows you to add additional address books, and not have to see just one long list.

What I would like to see added to the new program is a way to make the background of a message in color (so it gets viewed that way) without making it a setting. Good html and graphic control is important to me professionally. I don't want to have to go to AOL to get it.

Though it says it can, Eudora can't import my Mac address book. Adequate importing features would be necessary for me to use it as a default mail program.

While I'm dreaming, I would love to have the ability to duplicate any message. Using the Mac. Command D key would be ideal.

Additional items (Feel weird editing somebody else's item, but it is a wiki, and the suggestion says edit in place)

Support for Growl (vote: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363762)
Filters that can change personality (at the least) BEFORE the message is sent (vote for 361321

Maybe we should start an OS X specific thread?

IMPORTING MAIL FROM THUNDERBIRD TO EUDORA

Although Thunderbird recognizes Eudora for imports, Eudora does not recognize Thunderbird's mail folders or address book. Switching from Tbird to Eudora effectively means running two email programs until the older one contains no more useful files!

BUILT-IN EDITOR VS MY EDITOR

One thing that drives me crazy in ALL email programs (with the exception of Emacs) is that they lack the ONE correction feature that is always incredibly useful. The same goes for almost all word processing programs. The most common typing error is a transposition of two adjacent letters. In Emacs (and Epsilon), CTRL-T will swap them. What would be nice to have in the new Penelope is

either an implementation of this feature or the ability use one's preferred editor (or both).

S/MIME for Mac

Will the open-source release of Eudora for the Mac, at some point, support encryption and signatures using standards such as S/MIME, as T-bird does now? This is the one new feature that would make Eudora the perfect email client where I work.

The most important current features in Eudora, from my point of view, are:

1. Fast Boolean search over hundreds (or thousands) of mailboxes and hundreds of thousands of messages. <rant>Mail.app is totally worthless in this respect!</rant>

2. Mailboxes are text files that can be renamed and moved around in the filesystem, without opening Eudora. A user-configurable directory tree that provides as many levels of hierarchy as you need is the key to organizing a big email folder (mine is close to 1 GB, with more than 11 years' worth of email, and I'm sure there are many other users with even more). (So why would anybody need to keep old emails? Because they are a more accurate record of discussions and decisions than people's memories.)

3. Attachments can be stored in a separate, user-chosen directory. I like to search the current attachments folder and archived attachments folders by document name, contents and date without opening Eudora. Also, separating attachments from messages keeps down the size of the mailboxes.

Long time Windows Eudora User's wishlist

I use Outlook at work and for a short time, used Thunderbird on a U3 drive, but for myself I use Eudora and have for over 10 years. There are some must-haves for me in the new incarnation:

1. Signatures. I LOVE having the ability to change sig files depending on my mood. I have about 30 of them and would like more, with graphics.

2. Multiple "personalities." I have email accounts on many servers and need to be able to check them all and bring them in to one set of Inboxes

3. The Inbox feature. I don't want the monolithic database format of Outlook

4. The UI. I want to have the ability to have different windows open instead of that ugly tri-pane setup of Outlook and Thunderbird

5. I want to have Penelope portable to a U3 drive, like Thunderbird is now.

6. One change I would like to see is how attachments are handled. I would like the attachments to be stored in the same directory as the email message, and all attachments associated with a message deleted when the message is deleted. The never-ending pile of undifferentiated files in the attach folder is a pain and keeps the whole structure more bloated than it should be.

7. And now for the pony: I want a "universal" address book. Windows and Microsoft go for ubiquitous, but not universal, with Outlook. I want one place that can interact with phones, mail merge in most major word processing programs, as well as email. Names, addresses, email, web pages, multiple phone numbers, etc. In this context I'm not worried about "secure" but about interoperability.

Proposal to aid development of filters and connectivity

If Penelope is going to compete it will need top notch import and connectivity options. I'd like to propose the creation of a wiki for various email file formats and protocols. Several different formats(different mime and uuencoding, ) are documented in various places on the web as well as protocols (httpmail, exchange, groupwise). To have a central repository for this information with the addition of knowledge from eudora's filters would be a big win.

Duplicating and moving filters

Under the assumption that filter import from Eudora will be fully supported, my highest priority request is that copy, cut, and paste be implemented for filters. This would greatly facilitate:

Duplicating a template filter (with all check box and pull-down menu selections, and text entries) and
Moving selected filters up or down the filter list.

The current methods for doing these tasks have been the single most tedious aspect of my experience with Eudora to-date.

Multiple Undos

Feature Reminder: Multiple Undos currently present in Eudora WIN but not in Eudora MAC (a very useful feature when composing e-mails)

Another thought - attachments to only some recipients

Something that has occurred to me several times is that it would be useful to have a facility for sending an email to multiple users, but only include the attachments to a subset of the users. It would be useful for me because I often end up sending a bundle large attachments to several people, and also need to keep others aware of what is going on. They need to see that the email has been sent and that thare was an attachment (with the file name etc.), but they really don't want the attachment as well.

This could be done with something like a separate CC-without-attachments line in the email client window. Then the email client could automatically send out two versions of the email - one with the attachment and one with just the name of the attachment.

Outgoing Filters

All that I ask is that the outgoing mail filter feature remain. Although it exists in some other clients, the automatic feature is something I have yet to find. This feature helps me to organize my outgoing messages very easily once the filters have been created. Call me anal, but this is the only reason I have not jumped ship.

Been using Eudora since I was fifteen

I might have been even younger come to think of it. I thought I was power user, then I read this and realised I'm far from. Nothing has ever compared, I was terrified for a while that I might have to switch, especially when I found no other app that has the features I use every day. Glad to see it'll stay alive. Here's what matters to me:

I love that UI uses aliased text, please keep this as at least an option.

Maintain the link to OSX's Address Book.

The ability to link a personality to a template. This is key for me because there are certain personalities where I always to want BCC the same people for every email I send with that personality.

Keep the colour labels, useful for sorting incoming mail.

Like others, I love the Eudora folder. I have copied it from one computer to another so many times I can't keep count anymore.

For the anal retentive person in all of us, please maintain the 'Esoteric Settings'. Customization is spice of life.

And here are a handful of pet-peeves I would love to have addressed:

This is the BIGGY. The incoming mail filter detects which personality the email is being sent to by which account it is downloaded from and NOT from the personality described in the 'To:' or other headers. I remember reading on the message board the rationale for this (only guarantee on who it was sent to) and it does make sense, but it leaves users like me in a lurch who have one main account and a slew of alias accounts that forward to the main account. I like having it set up like this so if I'm not at home or at my office, I can log into my web-based email client and see all my emails, as opposed to logging into each account individually. It's funny because my web-based client does this just fine. Perhaps it could be an option in the Settings, either account-based or header-based. I have long dreamed of the day when I can click reply on an email that as been sent to an alternate personality and it is automatically assigned as being 'From:' the corresponding personality. Please.

Ever since I upgraded to the OSX version, there has been this strange lag between seeing the email downloaded in the task progress window (keep that too, love it) and it actually displaying in my inbox. Sometimes, it is immediate, other times it waits 10-20 seconds. I've even lost emails because I didn't notice it was happening and I've quit the app. Bizarre.

A volume control for the alert that is independent from the OS volume level. Some days I like listen to my music loud, sometimes quiet. On the days when I have it loud and I take a break an email will be delivered and the alert will blow my speakers out completely. It scares the shit out of my cats!!

I'm not sure how to add these to the voting list, so if some one could or at least email me how, it would be most appreciated.

Thanks! Glad to see Eudora will perserve!

Yet another collection of feature requests

WilfK (Nick: Airwolf85); 24th Dec 2006

I wholeheartedly support the comments of others, for features (from Eudora) to be retained by Penelope. I'm not sure if anyone has 'summmarised' a list of these, but I'd like to list the ones I've seen that I'd want to keep. In no particular order:

1. Ability to change/select the "Relay" personality.

2. Ability to change the sending personality.

3. The "BLAH" button.

4. The ability to more fully integrate, with the use of PGP. Perhaps, even the "PGP Desktop" program. (I'm not sure how, so I'll leave that to the developers.)

5. The fast searching capability.

6. Open mailboxes in their own window.

7. Format of setting up (and the scope/capabilities of) filters.

8. Format of the Address book.

9. Keep the look of the Eudora icons (or at least - the ability to select which icons are preferred).

10. Format of selecting and setting up stationery & signatures.

11. Ability to send images/documents etc. as either an attachement or embedded.

12. Keep the Junk Mail system (and maybe improve the "learning" capability of it).

13. Ability to open a message with Microsoft's viewer (if preferred).

14. Ability to time stamp messages.

15. Ability to easily import all settings (i.e. personalities, mailboxes, filters, etc) into Penelope, from their currently used version of Eudora.

16. Ability to individually set the POP & SMTP ports for each mail account.

17. NEW FEATURE - Have a user set option, to allow automatic updating of the Penelope version being used, with the option to either automatically be updated, or just be notified.

If the new "Penelope" could look (as well as work) as closely as possible to the way the latest Eudora (v7.1.0.9) does, I'd be very happy. The above are what I would hope would be the minimum included features in the new Penelope.

--Airwolf85 13:51, 24 December 2006 (PST)