So far, I’m sticking with Eudora as my email client. It’s one of those things that would take a lot of energy to change, even if Eudora is starting to feel as quaint and slightly outdated as its name. Just recently, Eudora has gotten two small extensions to its lease on life.

First, with the release of Eudora 5.2 for Mac OS X, you can now filter mail based on whether the address is in your address book. This finally lets me get nearly all spam into a single mailbox, where I can briefly scan it and then delete it. I had already set up aggressive filtering so that nearly every message that was left in my “in box” unfiltered was probably spam; however, this is nice because now I can add some users to my address book rather than creating a separate mailbox for them. Unfortunately, friends who send me email overnight from new addresses are at high risk of getting swept out in the first-thing-in-the-morning sweep of the “Total Strangers” mailbox.

But the real thriller, that I’ve been wanting for ages, is the ability to open URLs behind Eudora instead of having pages barge in front of the original message. Well, it turns out this has actually been around for a few years, but it’s controlled by an “X-Eudora-setting,” a quirky way that Mac users can access specialized Eudora preferences which aren’t available through the regular user interface. I’d come across these before, but somehow never thought to see if this behavior had a setting. Since I’d seen a number of applications recently offer an “open URLs in background” setting, I had come to think that I had to wait for Eudora to implement this, and went looking for it in version 5.2. Upon not finding it, I remembered the weird pseudo-interface of x-eudora-settings and after a bit of net searching, I found what I needed: <x-eudora-setting:258=y> To use this, copy and paste the string into a Eudora email (including the angle-brackets), and then double-click or command-click to activate it. (Remember, this is Mac only.) The key is setting the value to lowercase ‘y’. I used <x-eudora-setting:258> at first and manually typed in (uppercase) ‘Y’, and was frustrated to find that it didn’t work. Going back to the google search, I found the more detailed tip in this 1999 TidBITS article. Considering how long this has been bothering me, I’m a little embarassed to realize that the fix has been around that long — and that I probably learned about x-eudora-settings in the first place from that very article makes it worse! Ah well.

Power Mac Eudora users may want to check out Eudora’s official list of settings. Remember that these are meant for more sophisticated users, and you could probably mess things up a little if you’re careless.

Are there any Mac Mail users who switched from Eudora who can convince me that it’s easier than I think?