Mail and travel don’t mix

Jed

June 5, 2008

One thing I hate is when I arrive at my destination, and I sit down to do a quick email check, and then Eudora (which has more or less been behaving itself lately) manages to crash so thoroughly that (a) it crashes the whole machine and (b) it damages all its mail and settings files.

I carefully did a backup just before I left home, which is great, except that I won't be home again for another three days.

Usually what I do (and this has happened far far too many times in the last six months) is spend several hours while on the road doing my best to recover whatever I can of Eudora's collapse, and then spend several more hours when I get home cleaning up.

I think this time what I'm going to do is just not use Eudora for the next three days. That's going to be kind of a mess--my other mailreading options are limited--but I think it's going to be less of a mess than trying to fix the problems. Eudora seems to have really outdone itself this time, thoroughly hosing a significantly larger-than-usual number of mailboxes.

I gotta do something about Eudora. Odysseus is still being developed very slowly; it's possible in a couple months they'll have something I can use, but I don't know if I can wait that long. I may have to try Mail.app again, and figure out ways to work around the areas where it doesn't do what I want.

Oh, btw, I've arrived safely in Swarthmore, or rather Springfield (where the hotel is). I'm here for Alumni Weekend. I'm currently in the sort of mood in which one wonders why one bothered flying across the country, when one could have just stayed in bed with a pillow over one's head for the next few days; but I suspect that suitable application of food and friends will fix that.

So off I go to find some food and friends.

4 Responses to “Mail and travel don’t mix”

David D. Levine

06-05-2008 7:55 PM

I was a committed Eudora user on the PC, but when I went all-Mac-all-the-time in October I decided to try Mail.app rather than the unsupported Mac Eudora. I’ve been quite happy with Mail.app, especially since I used Eudora Mailbox Cleaner (http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/Eudora_Mailbox_Cleaner.html) to import my mail and settings. (It did take a couple of passes to get the import to work properly.) Yes, there are things Eudora can do that Mail.app can’t, but I’ve found that in general I can live without them, and Mail has hardly ever crashed on me and never lost data.
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Jed

06-06-2008 12:40 AM

Thanks, David.

I decided that now is actually an unusually good time for me to try out Mail.app. So I set it up tonight, being careful to leave all mail on the server after downloading it. I can see some rough edges already, and some areas where lack of Eudora features is going to annoy me, but there are also some pretty cool features that Eudora doesn’t have.

So I’ll give it a try for the next couple days, and possibly for a few days after that. And it’s conceivable that I’ll switch to it entirely.

I probably won’t port my Eudora archives; a gigabyte of mail dating back ten years, most of it in archived mailboxes, seems likely to put too much strain on Mail.app. But we’ll see.
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samuel

06-06-2008 9:29 AM

I’ve recently made the change to IMAP on my mail server.

I can now access it through SSL on my work machine, my notebook, my ancient desktop, or anywhere on the internet. I wish I’d made the transition years ago!

I use Mail.app on the notebook, and Thunderbird at work. It took a day or two of tweaking, but now if I file something in “Drafts” I have it with me no matter where I am. Same with Sent, Saved, Inbox, etc.

For what it’s worth, Mail.app seems to be holding its own, with about 40,000 emails.
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joycemocha

06-06-2008 7:53 PM

Does your host take webmail that you can wait to download when you’re back at home, or is that more of a hassle than trying to download it on the road?

My ISP has a webmail option that I use to view mail on the road or at work, and I wait to download it all until I’m back home at my desktop (I’m also running an ancient version of Eudora; still holding firm on that one).
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