Aside from its interface minimalism, another thing I loved about Eudora Light was that it was wicked fast -- faster than Emailer or any other email client I've ever used. Its main shortcoming, as far as I was concerned, was that it did not support multiple email accounts, but my workaround was to hack the application using Apple's ResEdit resource editor utility to allow multiple copies of Eudora Light to run simultaneously, each with its own separate Eudora folder. Since the program was so small, having six or eight copies up and running didn't use up a tremendous amount of disk space or RAM, and I would probably still be using this email client if it weren't for two issues: SMTP authentication/authorization and OS X.

To wit, Eudora Light, which was last updated in 1997, does not support SMTP authentication, and while it will run in Classic Mode under OS X, there is of course no native OS X version. With the introduction of Eudora 4.3 in early 2000, the separate freeware client was dropped in favor of an optional "Light" mode of operation incorporated into the theretofore "Pro" version of Eudora, along with full-featured ad-supported and paid modes. This was probably a sensible and inevitable bit of a product rationalization, but unfortunately Light mode is not as clean, quick, or slick as the old Eudora Light was. And the little streamed ad window is so well-behaved and unimposing that there's really little point in not activating the ad-support and getting the full feature set.

Happily, the gradual switch I made from Eudora Light to Eudora 4-6 over a couple of years was about as painless as could be. Because Eudora still uses the same mbox mail box format as Eudora Light did, it was just a matter of dragging my old mailboxes into the new Eudora mailboxes folder from the Eudora Light folders and renaming them where necessary.

Eudora 5 and 6 comes in both Classic Mac OS and a OS X native versions, which can conveniently share a common Eudora Folder containing mailboxes and settings, which allows dual-booters to switch back and forth between the two OS versions on the same computer completely transparently, with no loss of continuity in message access. This is accomplished by removing the Eudora Folder from the OS X Application Support folder and letting the application find the Eudora Folder in the OS 9 Documents folder.

As I mentioned above, the current versions of Eudora use pretty much the same interface conventions as Eudora Light did, although there are more windows that one can open to access elements of a vastly richer feature set. Eudora 4-6 of course supports SMTP authorization/authentication, and also has a powerful filtering capabilities and a very fast, efficient, and flexible search engine. Spell-checking that underlines misspelled words as you type is supported, as are a number of other basic word processing functions. You can opt to have a user-configurable tool bar or not as you prefer, and HTML email is supported, or can be turned off in favor of plain text. Adding attachments to messages is a simple matter of dragging and dropping files into the message header field.

The number of user-configurable settings in Eudora is awesome, but disarmingly intuitive to work with. You can also have as many mailboxes and hierarchical mailbox folders as suits your fancy. In the Mac tradition, Eudora is designed to do things your way. However it's also platform ambidextrous, so you can drag Eudora for Windows mailbox files into Eudora for Mac and vice versa. Eudora 6.0, which is still in public beta release, has a very slick junk mail management feature that works well, and is also highly configurable in the Eudora tradition.

My main complaint about Eudora 4-6 is that it's sluggish compared with good old lightning-fast Eudora Light, especially the OS X version, which can be ponderously slow at times. If it were not for that, and its as-yet inexplicable refusal to support one of my email accounts and a couple of SMTP servers (that worked fine with other email programs) I would consider Eudora 6.0 as close to perfect as you can currently get in a Mac email client.

On the other hand, it may not be quite up Marc Zeedar's alley in terms of a replacement for his beloved Claris Emailer. Back in the old days, there seemed to be an affinity dichotomy between those who liked Eudora and another school of thought that preferred Claris Emailer or other clients with a "3 box" user interface like PowerMail, or (gag) Microsoft Outlook Express and Entourage.

My son, for example, was a PowerMail fan before he switched to OS X Mail, and was never partial to Eudora for interface reasons.

Eudora may be operated in a US $49.95 paid version, an ad-supported version, or the reduced-feature Light version -- all available in the same download.

For more information, visit:
http://www.eudora.com/
While Eudora it is my main email management application, I also use Nisus Email for several of my e-mail accounts. As with Eudora, Nisus Email comes in both Classic Mac OS and OS X native versions, which can likewise share a common Nisus Email settings and mailboxes folder by substituting an alias of the OS 9 Nisus Email folder for a real folder in the OS X Application Support folder -- a facility that no doubt would appeal to dual-booting Marc. What perhaps wouldn't appeal to him is the fact that Nisus Email is also a minimalist interface application, in some ways more reminiscent of Eudora Light in this regard and than Eudora itself is these days.

Indeed, you can configure Nisus Email to integrate with a text editor or word processor, with messages opening in and sending from your word-crunching application of choice. Nisus hopes you will choose Nisus Writer, but you don't have to. Just about any application that can support plain text files, which are what Nisus Email uses to archive messages, will do nicely.

Nisus Email also has other unique features, like it's one or two click message sending from the Desktop, and the ability to preview the contents of your inbox and delete spam (or whatever) without downloading it first, which is a great boon to those of us on dial-up connections. Mail filters in Nisus Email work well, but there is no Junk filter.

The downside of Nisus Email is that, like Eudora, it's slow in OS X. It has a pretty good search engine, but it's much slower than Eudora's, and not nearly as configurable or slick. HTML e-mail is not supported, which is no hardship as far as I'm concerned, but that may be an issue for some folks. The contact list is a bit quirky, too.

Typical of Nisus software, Nisus Email has a vast number of customizable capabilities that many users will probably never tap into. It's really in a league of its own, and in many ways not like any other email client well worth checking out if you are on the prowl for a new email application.

Nisus Email sells for US $29.95.

For more information, visit:
http://www.nisus.com/products/nisusemail/

I also used for a while a Japanese email client called SweetMail, whose developer told me that his inspiration was Eudora Light, and there was a definite resemblance. However, the SweetMail download site has been non-functional for some time, and I'm guessing that development has been terminated.

Aside from the slowness, I'm reasonably satisfied with both Eudora and Nisus Email, and am not seriously on the prowl for a new email client. I've never cottoned to OS X Mail, wouldn't use Outlook Express or Entourage on principle even if they were good software, which they're not, and while some of the other available email software is interesting, I still want Classic Mac OS support for the foreseeable future, which eliminates a lot of the other candidates these days.

One new email client I checked out recently is Mozilla's ThunderBird. Mozilla is moving away from the browser suite motif inherited from Netscape of yore, and its next generation FireBird browser, currently in beta, will be a standalone application with no built-in email client. Hence ThunderBird, a freestanding companion email client.

Aside from my general disaffection for 3-box email client interfaces, I find the ThunderBird beta to be a very decent program, and in general I like it better than OS X Mail. It's slow to start up, but once it's running it's very fast -- better on that score than Eudora or Nisus Email by a considerable margin. On the downside, it insists that you configure the same SMTP server for sending mail with all accounts, which emphatically does not work for me, and I find its inability to select and copy both the header and body information simultaneously from messages too cumbersome for my purposes. ThunderBird is also astonishingly large for an email client application -- an 11 megabyte download in its OS X version, and the uncompressed disk image is a whopping 33.2 MB, which is also about the size of the application file. By comparison, the Eudora 6.0 installer, unstuffed, is only 3.3 MB. However, if these aren't deal-breaker issues for you, you might want to check ThunderBird out. Like the Mozilla browser, it's freeware.

For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

One major issue when switching email clients is whether or not you can import your archived email files from your old application. Eudora can import files and contact lists from Claris Emailer and Outlook Express. Nisus Email can import contacts form other email applications copied to the Clipboard, but not archived email messages. ThunderBird can inherit email data from Mozilla or Netscape Mail, and I'm guessing that It will have other import options in the final or later beta versions.

At the end of the day, however, in my books Eudora is still the email client to have if you're only having one.
http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/emailers.shtml

For a comprehensive review of other email apps go to Moore's Mac Email Client Roundup - 2003 Edition http://www.applelinks.com/mooresviews/emailru03222.shtml