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) 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)
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 (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.
Eudora + Threading = Good
That is the feature at the top of my list that I'd like to see added to Eudora. Despite many requests for from many people over the years, it just never seemed to be a priority before. We got features like MoodWatch instead (eww). Beyond that, I'd like to see Eudora continue to be the excellent email client it has always been. --Hapster 14:16, 11 October 2006 (PDT)
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. 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.
- AppleScript scriptability. (I know, I know... getting that supported in Thunderbird will be really rough, but without it, things will not be good.)
- 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)
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.
Feature request
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.
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), iCal events, etc. Build for new Leopard technologies in this area.
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. 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
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)
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.
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.
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 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)
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
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
(((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 - vertical or horizontal toolbar - abilty to add many different commands to toolbar - 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 good 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, 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 "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.