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Monday, December 18, 2000
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Eudora Mail – a remarkable alternative

E-mail is perhaps the most happening thing in the world today. Newer e-mail software hit the market regularly allowing user to add a lot of value to their e-mailing experience. Interestingly, most e-mail software are free, these include software like Outlook Express, Netscape Mail and Eudora Mail. In the earlier editions we have discussed Outlook Express and Netscape, so let us now take up the Eudora Mail.

There is no consensus so far on the best e-mailing software, though Outlook Express, Netscape and Eudora Mail are equally popular, the choice of e-mail clients could be very subjective and thus cannot be categorised as best or second best. On the whole, Eudora Mail qualifies as a good feature rich mail client.

Eudora Mail 5 is the latest version of this software from Qualcomm; Eudora Mail has been a popular e-mail client since the days of Internet shell accounts, as it allowed pop mail type of features in Unix shell. Today too, Eudora Mail is feature rich and has added features like voice because of a voice recorder built into the e-mail client. This feature allows users to send voice e-mails very conveniently.

 


The Eudora Mail 5 has some other features like: Eudora Mail Sharing Protocol (ESP); that allows the users to automatically sync files to keep their contacts including family, friends and co-workers up-to-date. Another feature termed Moodwatch, warns the users about the contents in the outgoing and incoming mail. It is basically a language tool, which acts as an emotion monitor. Thus, this feature warns you before hand if you have used offensive language in your mail, or if there is any offending mail in your mailbox. It is not just limited to offensive language as it also recognises light mood.

Yet another feature is the E-mail Usage Stats. This feature records a user’s day-to-day e-mail activity and records it allowing the users to view it later. Another interesting new enhancement in the Eudora Mail 5 is the EIS 2.0. This feature is related to Palm Operating System and offers an excellent quality e-mail client and browser for hand held devices.

For keeping multiple e-mail accounts in one e-mail client, Eudora Mail provides an excellent platform. The personalities in this software refer to the various accounts that you have created in it. The best part of this software is its user-friendly interface, which allows the users to access various features easily. You can even configure your Yahoo e-mail account in Eudora Mail, which scores over other e-mail software on the ease of use.

Eudora Mail also offers a facility to set e-mail filters and restrictions, using which, you can block some e-mails or even transfer them directly to any mail box created by you, thus avoiding the unnecessary crowding of e-mails in your inbox. There are thousands of other filter action combinations, which help in organising and prioritising your messages. A feature called "Make Filter command" and additional filter options include choices like Personality, Sound, Open, Print, Forward, Redirect, Reply, Server Options, Label and Speak, which is further value addition to management of e-mails.

There are several other features of Eudora Mail like easy import from other common e-mail clients, which helps in managing a single and full-featured address book and message record. Using Eudora Mail, you can easily transfer the list of your contacts from any e-mail client and can consolidate it in your Eudora Mail. Moreover you can also have custom fields in your address book, which includes nicknames etc. The easy and wide spread search capability of this e-mail client lets you specify multiple search criteria and specific folders and mailboxes to be searched. Results are displayed in a single window where you can review, sort, transfer and delete selected messages.

Using Eudora Mail, you can also assign colour coding to your incoming messages, either manually or automatically using filters. The colour coding labels help you understand the priority of the mail, which can save your time by ignoring junk mail. Adding further value to your inbox is the feature, which allows sorting in your inbox based on the criteria selected by you. These criteria could be based on several parameters like sender, date, subject, etc. You can select any of these criteria by simply clicking on a column in the header. This will not only sort the existing messages as per the criteria set by you, but will also automatically sort the new messages that you receive in future.

Like other popular e-mail clients, Eudora Mail 5 has full IMAP support. The IMAP or Internet Message Access Protocol allows you to access mailboxes and mail folders that are stored on a remote IMAP server, and download your messages only when needed. Eudora Mail also offers on-line spell check. This feature resembles a word processor as it highlights all the misspelled words and prompts the right spellings.

You can use signature files and also create your digital signature files in Eudora Mail 5. However, the outstanding feature of Eudora Mail related to message composing is text formatting, as you can generate styled text (font, colour, size, style, margins, etc.) from the text menu. You can also paste in styled text. Styles are maintained when included in replies and forwarded messages. It also supports HTML styled text and formatting, which allows you to use, embedded graphic, hyperlinks, etc in your e-mail.

Another feature of Eudora Mail that resembles the Netscape mail is automatic name and address completion. Under this feature, Eudora Mail will automatically suggest you the e-mail address of the recipient based on name and address in your address book. Eudora Mail also handles attachments well. Unlike any other e-mail client, you can drag and drop attachments files in your Eudora Mail client from any folder or drive and thus you need not type the whole address of the attachment

Working with Eudora Mail is quite easy. It is also faster as you can do multitasking in your Eudora Mail client i.e. you can receive e-mails while composing another message. Eudora Mail 5 is a feature packed e-mail clients that is available in three modes, full-featured, free and sponsored. Eudora can be downloaded free from www.eudora.com

— Roli

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