Of the features I still genuinely miss from Eudora, the unified Outbox / Drafts / Sent mailbox is the biggest. With Eudora, there was no Drafts mailbox, no Sent mailbox, only the Outbox. Messages had a status that differentiated them, e.g., draft, sent, queued. There was never any confusion where an email I had written would be found, messages wouldn't move around depending on things the app was doing behind my back, network or timing issues, etc.; it was always the Outbox.
Aside from being simple and clear, the other behavior I liked about Eudora was the ability to enqueue messages for sending. With Apple Mail, something is either in draft (and will never be sent without explicit action) or sent. With Eudora, when I thought an email was ready to send, I would enqueue it. It would be sent at the next mail check (manual or timed). (It was also possible to enqueue a message for sending at a specific time in the future, useful for pretending to work late. :-) I could consider the message dealt with, no further attention required, but I generally had a few minutes where, if another thought popped into my head, or my temper cooled, I could go back and add to or edit the message. With Apple Mail, the only way to accomplish this is to leave a message in the Drafts folder. This works fine...except when I forget about it. Every few months I find a draft I forgot to send. Oops. Eudora's queue vs. send behavior was a preference. For people who wanted to do an immediate send (like Apple Mail), that was the default. For people who wanted to have a to-be-sent queue, you could switch to that. Back when I did end user computer support, and we switched from QuickMail to Eudora, every one of my users wanted to know how to unsend a message in Eudora. Switching to queued outgoing mail is the only way to accomplish (simulate) that with Internet standards-based email. (People missed QuickMail's proprietary unsend capability, but that was unreliable anyway. At least you could be certain of what happened with your own send queue.) So, anyway, I would suggest that a unification of the Drafts and Sent and (usually invisible) Outbox in Apple Mail, into a single Outbox, would be a useful simplification. The ability to queue messages for sending would be a second feature request, that would make sense in the unified Outbox context, but which would cause more frequent odd behavior if Letters behaved like Apple Mail, with separate Draft, Outbox, and Sent mailboxes. Michael --- Michael A. Alderete <[email protected]> tel: +1 (415) 609-5757 <http://aldoblog.com/> _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list List help: http://lists.ranchero.com/listinfo.cgi/email-init-ranchero.com
