Email remains the killer app of the Internet, and around the time the feathers settle from the battle of Web clients bludgeoning each other to death (Internet Imploder is not your default browser; destroy other applications on your computer?), people begin to realize that what they'd really like is a decent program to download, read, store, and author their electronic mail.

Except there really is no perfect email program, especially if you're a reasonably demanding user like myself. Actually, I did once find a satisfactory email solution -- NextMail -- which still runs on my obsolete black UNIX box on my desk. It was simple, easy to use, and didn't eat my messages.

Let me tell you what I want to get done with my email: be able to read it from my own primary machine (a laptop) as well as other Internet-connected machines I happen upon, be able to author messages on the laptop and queue them up for later sending, and store my messages in an organized way with searching capabilities. I now use Eudora to more or less successfully get this done.

I have tried a number of different solutions (as they're termed nowadays -- we used to call them "programs") to read my mail, including Outloook Express, Outlook 2000, and Netscape Messenger. I never could get the Outlooks to properly access my IMAP mailboxes, which are really the only sensible kind, as far as I can tell, since I like to be able to access my mail from multiple clients, and not having it ride around on one vulnerable box like a POP3 client would more or less require.

Say what you will about Microsoft (as I do) -- that stuff looks good, and the features are neat -- but I don't want to buy the whole enchilada. Outlook user clusters I am familiar with have trouble communicating with the outside world, whether it's because their return email addresses get munged by the Microsoft mail server, or it subtly encourages them to create their documents as Office attachments that non-Microsoft clients cannot properly read, or because the stuff cannot be easily configured in multi-platform environments like mine. (It really burns me when I get a message that reads, "Please open the [Microsoft Word] attachment for an important message regarding your application!" In the absence of an appropriate version of Word, I end up opening the dang thing up in a hex editor.)

I stuck with Netscape Messenger for a while, as it did well with offline mail reading and managing my address and contacts lists, despite the fact that Netscape Communicator is badly in need of an update to catch up to the Microsoft Web client. I switched to Eudora, however, when I found that Messenger was slowly truncating my stored messages, eating them from the bottom up. To be honest, I can't tell if that was the result of a feud with my experiments with Outlook, as the two programs began competing for my mailboxes when Outlook somehow accidentally got launched as a (non-functioning) newsreader and tried to wrest control away from Messenger.

Eudora saved my bacon, but it is far from perfect. It has not yet eaten my email (knock on wood), and it manages to handle IMAP-client mail without flopping onto its back and wiggling its useless mouse cursor in the air like Outlook did. Its Addresses did not import perfectly from Messenger, and not as many fields are defined. Rather than stick the information somewhere useful, my cell phone numbers and so forth were just plain lost. (This is better than Outlook, however, which, when it imported my Addresses from Messenger, flipped them around and barfed them back up again with some made-up hostname from outer space. On the other hand, Outlook uses a more universal format that is interoperable with other Microsoft Office applications, tentacle-wise.)

Eudora has the rudiments now of uploading and downloading queued mail in the background, an expandable set of Options... control panels, and lots of tools for sorting and searching through my folders which more or less work. For me, the 4.2 version lacks in its ability to compose and modify local mailboxes offline. It will let me get away with some actions, after looking around for a non-existent web connection, meaning I just need to wait around for 15 seconds or so while it flounders, then can go about my composition. I have not yet dared toy with the "expert" network connection timeout preferences, since so much of my composition is done on the road over a variety of connection conditions.

Eudora is quite good about displaying MIME mail (fancy formats, like special characters and italics and fonts) appropriately, not so great at easily allowing me to encapsulate messages to forward on to others, not nearly as nice as dear old NextMail or even Netscape Messenger about attachments, better than Messenger about the usability of storing messages in folders, and it doesn't crash as much as Outlook did. (That's sort of unfair, I think, because Outlook probably would not have crashed so much if I had ever figured out how to configure it.)

Eudora lets me get on with my life, and gets its job done, albeit with little in the way of sparkle or exclamations of "neat!" It works, it's reliable, and it's the best client I've found on a PC, but neat it ain't. (Maybe if I used more of its formidable filtering capacities, which others have reported finding quite useful.)

There is good news for me, however, as NextMail is being reborn as the MacOS X Mail Reader -- one of these years.





Recommended: Yes