There are no lack of such, on your Mac you automatically get Mail (normally called Apple Mail in contrast to other email programs). Thunderbird is popular, some are forced to use Outlook, and there are many others. All do of course the same basic things of collecting and sending your email, although they differ in more advanced stuff as automatic filtering into mailboxes and the like. Which you choose is a matter for another column. I am here more concerned with those who may suddenly find that they are cut off from their old Eudora mail, because their new Mac will not run the program. What to do?Well, the mail is not lost, of course. Eudora kept its mailboxes as "straight text files", so you find the "Mail" folder inside your Eudora folder, and just open any mailbox in any word processor you like. But then all text as well as technical headers of the mailbox will be one long document of text, not as individual email messages. How to keep the structure?
One option, and the easiest, is to import all your old mail into your new email program. Since Eudora was so common, many or most modern Mac email systems have an "import email from Eudora" option, certainly both Apple Mail and Thunderbird do. For those two (and even for importing into other programs), it may be also be useful to use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner program. That is a small "applet" that prepares your old Eudora mail for importation, and then copies it into either of those two programs, so that you can just open the new program of choice and find your email. Often the Cleaner does a better job of transferring from old to new than the new program's own import options. (Notice that Cleaner does not run under the Lion system, so you must use it before upgrading.)Some perhaps useful jargon: POP or IMAP
Another very useful option, if your email account is of the POP type, to change it to IMAP in old Eudora before you change. Then there is no importing required. These may be Greek terms to you, but put very briefly, they are two ways your email server handles your email: In the older POP system, your email is transferred from your server (your "email provider": your university or cable company, or whereever your email account is) to your Mac. Eudora lets you keep a copy on the server for a while, but the main mail storage is on your local Mac. In IMAP it is the opposite, your email is kept on the server. You may and normally do get a copy on your local Mac(s), but the "original" is on the server. In IMAP the structure of mailboxes and folders and stuff is also on the server and thus the same whichever computer you connect from, in POP it is only on your local Mac.
It is up to the provider which system it provides its email in, but many or most now support both options and allow you to choose. You can check which one you use now by going to the menu Special: Settings: Mail Protocol, it will have the options POP or IMAP. Check with your provider before you change that, if you go from POP to IMAP you may have to change the server address and other settings. You can then copy your existing local mail back to the IMAP server. If you do that, it will then be automatically available in whichever new email program you use. POP was most common before and is most likely what your Eudora is set up with, but check, if it is already an IMAP account, switching to a new email program is quite easy. It is also useful when you are not sure which email program you will be settling for, you can test several and switch back and forth with relative ease, as the mail is anyway always on the server.
Email in storage
However, you probably have accumulated lots of email and may want to make a clean break with your new program (thus also for the Imap option mentioned, it may slow down in particular if you have too many messages - more than a couple of thousand - in your In box, and some providers set a quota of how many MB you may store in your account on their server). This was my case when I switched a year or two ago to Apple Mail; I started out with a clean new setup, but still wanted to have access, of course, to my old email. I therefore kept old Eudora around, and opened it only when there was some old information I wanted from that period. That will then no longer be possible under Lion, so I had to look at a new way to access this old Eudora email in a useful fashion (searching by date etc.)
A possibility recommended by some is to import old Eudora email into a "note archive" program, since I only want to read the email as an archive. One program some recommend is Eagle Filer, which imports Eudora email and presents it to you in the original structure of mailboxes and folders within folders (if you have such). That seemed to work fine, it imported fairly quickly. However, it could not understand the formatting commands in the emails (which you don't see in Eudora, but in Eagle Filer turned up as <blockquote type="cite" cite>Notice: </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" cite>1)Make note of..." with the real text mixed in, so it was hard to read. Also, a large proportion of the email had lost the dates, it was all "written in 1904", so it was not terribly useful.I therefore put the Eagle aside, and since I already had the old mail in a separate mail program (old Eudora), I thought it would be easier to keep that idea, and just find a new program that could read old Eudora mail, but which would not be used for active email. Well, there was no reason to look far: There is actually a new Eudora, called Eudora OSE 1.0, and what would be more useful than to read Eudora email in a refreshed Eudora?
You may wonder why the detour, why not go directly to this new and upgraded Eudora at once? The reason is that it isn't really an upgraded Eudora, it is a completely different email program that has adopted the Eudora name. It is actually a version of the freeware email program Thunderbird (which is part of the Firefox package), but it has been modified to look and behave more like old Eudora, so that old hands should find it useful. According to web sources, its reception has been "less than enthusiastic", it took a long time coming (it is a freeware program, you don't pay, but noone pays the people who develop it either), it has suffered under various bugs and glitches, and it clearly differs in many ways from old Eudora. So, many people have not found it yet to be a worthy successor, and since I only use Apple Mail actively, I cannot either recommend or warn against Eudora OSE as an active email program.But one thing it should excel in, is to import email from its older counterpart, so that was my second stop. Did it work? Yes, it did, although it took some time. The main problem seems to be the actual process of importing large amounts of mail. I had two different Eudora folders, one at home with a more reduced set of email, 20-30.000 emails or so, and the full archive on my office Mac, with 88.000 emails from 1991 to 2008, and sorted into I think about 600 different mailboxes. Sounds like a lot, but over seventeen years, things do pile up.
Method One: Eudora OSE's Import command
So, I started at home. First I installed Eudora OSE. Since it is an email program, it must have some mail account to refer to, but I wasn't going to use it for new and current email, only for old storage. Thus, I set it up for an old passive mail account I had, and set "never check for mail". You can probably just write in a spurious account or wrong password, as long as you set it to not check that account.
Then, I used Eudora OSE's own Import command and asked for Import from Eudora. It selected correctly the old Eudora Mail folder, and trundled along importing them (it has to change the structure of the mailboxes, so some internal work is needed). But when it finished, it just stopped with a blank dialogue, with a "Next" button greyed out. On force-quitting (after waiting an hour), there was now a "Eudora Import" mailbox, but it was empty, and I could neither delete it nor do anything with it. This corresponds to reports from other users, so this is clearly a common situation. I guessed that size mattered, so I went back to old Eudora Mail folder and moved most of the mailboxes out of it to another folder, leaving only a few items behind, then tried again (evidently, old Eudora was not running at this time). This time it worked: A "Eudora Import 0" folder appeared in the "Local Folders" hierarchy, with the mail I had left there correctly structured. Then, I went back and switched in another set of mailboxes into Eudora Mail, and chose Import again in OSE, which put it in Eudora Import 1 (In, Out, and Junk are recreated, so you get new empty ones for each import folder).
By thus taking the import in steps, I was able to import all of it. However, Eudora OSE was not done: At once I opened it, it started to "index" the mailboxes, and this it kept on for a while. Anyway, I did not want them in the Import 1...n subfolders, so I selected all mailboxes and dropped onto the Local Folder icon in the hierarchy, which again worked fine; now I had the old structure in place in the new program. However, it then started indexing again the same mailboxes it had already indexed before. Indexing is useful, but takes both time and place. My original folder was about 500 MB, but after the index, the hard disk reported about 2GB less space than before. Maybe it will be reclaimed later, and who counts hard disk space any more.Method Two: Using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
Spurred on by this, I tried it again at the larger mail folder at the office. Would Eudora Mail Cleaner work better and avoid having to import bit by bit? Cleaner has two "to" options, Mail and Thunderbird, but as I said, Eudora OSE is esssentially Thunderbird, and in fact it keeps its mail in [user] Library: Application Support: Thunderbird. So letting Cleaner import my old mail into Thunderbird would let Eudora OSE access it? Yes, it did. Cleaner did a good job of it, so after it was finished, I fired up Eudora OSE, set it up with the spurious account, and there my structure was in "Local Folders": Again in (a single) Import folder, which I could drop onto Local Folders to get them one step up in the hiearchy (and thus directly under the "Mailboxes" menu, as in old Eudora).
So it trundled on indexing my 88.000. And went on and went on. And stopped. I tried opening a folder to read the mail in it, but no go. Then wait. Then tried another folder, and nothing happened. And then again; the menu line did not budge. But after a bit, I got the list of the first folder I had asked for. All correct, but it had spent this time working on it. So, I went home to leave it indexing overnight. The next morning, it had just stopped. Quit, restarted, and it started indexing again where it had left off, so at least it had not been lost yesterday's work. But it was still quite unresponsive. A bit later in the day, when I checked back (it had stopped a couple of times, but begun again on quit and restart the program), it had frozen, and now it would not restart even after a force-quit. A Crash reporter reported that there was nothing to report. Again and again each time I tried to start the program, so Eudora was apparently lost.
Well, what to do. Again, the email folder was really in a Thunderbird folder, so maybe Thunderbird, the original program, could access it. Download and install. Looks different from Eudora, and happily was so different that it was not affected by Eudora's crash: It opened, and as expected did find and use the mail folders as it should be. However, it was still fairly unresponsive. Unlike Eudora OSE, Thunderbird did not tell me much of what it was doing, but it was clearly doing something of its own. I found that opening a separate Tab in the mailboxes window (Th-bird has such tabs) was useful, keep a welcome message or something in the other tab and switch to that, then back to the mailbox, and there the mail was listed in place. Go to another mailbox, nothing. But click in the other tab and back, and you could read it.
Well, OK, not useful if I must do that for 600 mailboxes. But perhaps Th-bird had cleared up Eudora OSE's problem? Quit one and start the other, and correctly: Eudora OSE came up, and went back to its indexing spree. But at least this time it eventually finished. And now it works, I can get to all mailboxes, and all spring up at once with the content in place.
One thing that was probably linked to my crashes as cause or effect, was many duplicated empty mailboxes. These appear in particular in mailboxes with punctuation in their names, in particular slashes (/) and periods (.). The first is obvious, Eudora 6 allowed slashes in mailbox names, but they interfere with the file name system in OS X, and even Apple Mail has problems with a mailbox called "London / Paris". OSE renamed it "London:Paris", with the content in place, but then added another empty "Londo5673abd980" mailbox. The same with mailboxes with periods like "Berlin, etc." The comma seems to be fine, but the period causes it to create a spurious "Berli098sdf" alongside the correct "Berlin, etc.", this with its period in place. So it is a good idea to rename any such mailboxes in old Eudora before the transfer, whether or not it affected my problems (which I'm sure were mostly size-related), it does not hurt to avoid punctuation in mailbox names. Removing the empty mailboxes was no problem, and was a once-only operation.
So far, it seems to work, then. The main problem is the transfer itself, and if your mail archive is large, you may have to struggle a bit. But it seems to get there in the end, after jumping through variuos hoops, and as far as these first impressions go, it seems that I can use new Eudora as a full replacement for old Eudora in the limited function I had for it, as a reader of old mail. Whether it can replace old Eudora also as an everyday email program for new and current mail, is not something I have tested, but which probably depends both on how advanced your setup is, and on how patient you are to have mistakes corrected (and willing to experiment to get around issues like we have discussed above). Apple Mail of course has Apple's mighty programming machine behind it, but Eudora OSE does benefit from its closeness to the better supported Thunderbird, even if the OSE program itself is likely to have some bugs left in it.
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