gf-tech.com

I use Eudora for email both at work and at home. Currently I use the sponsored more of Eudora which displays a small that that is easily ignorable.

There are many reasons why I use Eudora, and most of them revolve around useability of the application. I was first introduced to Eudora in University circa 1993. It was all I could use for a number of years, and as a student, the free option is always a good thing.

When I entered my professional career I continued using Eudora, even when the norm was Outlook. I stuck with it because I liked the options, still considered it feature rich, and it allowed me to get my work done.

One feature I like is the ability to detach mailboxes. I am not constrained by my mail application to only see mail in one mailbox. The below view shows 4 mailboxes. The upper left mailbox is my inbox, and I keep this one on top. The other visible mailboxes are current projects I am working on.

My mailbox browser is detachable, and I generally keep it on a second monitor.

This combination allows me to quickly see new email arrive in my one inbox, deal with it, then place it in the correct folder. Email that I want to deal with later gets marked as Unread. This is how I deal with my email, and this is where Outlook fails (and Thunderbird when I last tried it).

In Eudora one of the more powerful features is the filtering options. Below is the filter creation dialog.

One of the filtering features I use a lot is the Manual option for a filter. This allows me to create a filter that only runs when I tell it to, and only on messages that I have selected. Powerful feature. At work I deal with entering bugs for a third party product. Each correspondence with this third party has a bug Id. When I enter a new bug, I create a new mailbox to house email for that bug. When I get email pertaining to that bug I read it, reply to it, then filter this email off to the mailbox by hitting a quick key combo. I do this with the manual filter option. I love this. Quick and easy.

This is where Outlook fails me. There is no option to do this. Filters get run on new mail as it arrives, and email gets shunted to mailboxes (if I set the filter to do that). Now for me to read new email I have to start weeding through multiple mailboxes. No way I want to do that. Too time consuming and too easy to miss a message. The alternative is to let all email arrive in the inbox, and move it by hand. Again, too much work that I don't want to handle.

This week I trialed AutoMate by Pergenex. This was a promising plugin since it seemed to add a lot of missing filtering functionality to Outlook. Sadly it will not help me since I cannot set filters to run only on selected messages. There is an option to run filters after a period of time (no indication of how long this is), but it runs over an entire folder, and not on selected messages.

So, I live on with Eudora. I want to join the Outlook crowd at work since Outlook has an integrated calendar and people at work tend to like meeting requests. This is the biggest reason I want to use Outlook, but its shortcomings prevent me from moving over. I could live with the single monitor constraint that Outlook has, and I could even live with the single mailbox view at a time, but I can't live without my filters.