Well, I’m going to ask for opinions, so I guess this isn’t a GQ topic.
What are good/bad reasons for using Eudora instead of Outlook? What is it better/worse at? What are cool things to use in it?
I know there have to be some non MS people out there.
Oh, and I guess I was focusing somewhat on virus issues. Is it true that you’re more protected by not using Outlook, at least as not being a spreader of the virus?
I’ve never really used POP mail much, as I got a Hotmail account in about '98. Does Eudora automatically download attachments, or can they be left on the server until they are requested? Isn’t this SOP?
If you are a PC user, you are indeed better protected when you use Eudora than when you use Outlook. At any given time, there are workarounds and setting changes that can be performed on Outlook if you know how, but the folks who write viruses continue to try to exploit weaknesses in Outlook. Some may say that the only reason Eudora viruses have not proliferated is that Eudora has a smaller market share, but Eudora does seem to be less intrinsically vulnerable to viruses exploiting “preview” and “execute automatically” options that are built into Outlook.
More significantly, the rest of the world is better protected from you if you use Eudora. Something like 95% of the malicious viruses that have wreaked havoc since 1998 have been specifically Outlook viruses. The percent that have spread by exploiting Eudora’s address book? 0%. Effectively 100% of the viruses that have been landing in your inbox have come from an infected Outlook user. Eudora users, even if personally infected because they double-clicked and launched a virus, don’t get turned into virus distributors. (I suppose a few Eudora users manually forward an email with an attached virus to someone else out of ignorance but that’s about it).
Eudora fetches mail, including attachments. Attachments are kept in a separate folder. They don’t execute unless you specifically double-click them and launch them.
You can filter email based on attachments, words or phrases within the body content, words or other character strings within any of the email headers. You can also assign an inbound email to any of several “personalities” that you create (these usually correspond to different email accounts you use, but you can use them any way you want to) automatically and then subject your email to different filtering rules depending on the personality (e.g., if you have a work account you don’t use for personal email, you can assign all email addressed to it to the personality “Work” and in a subsequent filter move all email from any domain other than your workplace straight to the trash can if personality is “Work”).
Eudora lets you handle a much higher total volume of old and current email and search it for strings in the body or subject or headers. I’ve got all my email dating back to 1991, divided up into 26 mailboxes and constituting somewhere between 650,000 and 750,000 individual pieces of email (hard to get an exact count because of an email Digest that Eudora splits into individual posts). My girlfriend has less total volume but uses a more complicated filing system and has about 250,000 pieces of email dating back to 1997 or so, divided up into about 75(!) different mailboxes. Outlook will let you do a good portion of this (managing multiple accounts, custom filtering, searching) but awkwardly; performance plummets once you’ve got more than a hundred thousand emails or so, and searches in Outlook, in particular, are really slow.
Also, a corrupted Outlook email file may lose you all the email that’s in it. Eudora uses industry standard (Unix tradition) format for storing email, so even a corrupted file is just a text file and can be cannibalized and/or fixed with a plain text editor. (Also makes it easy to move email to another industry-standard-compliant email program such as Netscape, or vice versa).