Thanks a lot to all posters. I am reading all posts carefully. It is
nice to see that Mailmate has a real community of users, something
that I truly appreciated about Eudora.
I am responding here to Bill since he most directly addressed my concerns.
On 14.06.2016 at 14:02 Uhr -0400 Bill Cole apparently wrote:
MailMate is the only MUA that I have liked since giving up on Eudora
6.2.4. It's the only MUA my boss would move to himself and bless as
a company standard. Based on our experiences and on those of most of
my colleagues who have moved to MM, I expect that anyone with "old
school" email proclivities and a lot of email will find it the only
serious option on MacOS X. I also find it telling that I see names
popping up on this list of people who I've looked up to
professionally for many years as technical experts and people who
have helped preserve email as the Internet's "killer app" under the
toxic pressures of spam and other abuse. People who know and love
email use MailMate.
It seems that quite a few power mail users are still hanging on to
using Eudora, so Mailmate can continue to grow its users base if it
can manage to gain some repuation as a viable Eudora replacement, may
be make a concious effort to add a few unique but popular Eudora
features.
HOWEVER: The fact that you're still using "real" Mac Eudora (i.e.
6.2.4, not "Eudora OSE") and the window style in your screenshot
implies an impediment in moving to MailMate: OS version. MM is
distributed as a x86_64 binary and requires MacOS X 10.7 (Lion).
Eudora 6.2.4, the last version, was a PowerPC-only application and
so requires Rosetta to run on any Intel Mac. Rosetta does not exist
for any MacOS version past 10.6, so you are clearly running a system
version that cannot run MailMate. If you cannot upgrade to Lion
(e.g. if you have a 1st generation Core Duo or PowerPC Mac) MM is
not an option for you at all.
Good observation. Yes, I am running 10.6 on my main computer but I
need to move on to 10.10 or 10.11 hence my intensified search for a
replacement for Eudora. I already have a smaller laptop running
Yosemite which I plan to use for testing Mailmate.
Also, mailbox conversion can be a real problem, which is a Eudora
issue NOT a MailMate issue. For most of my 4 years wandering in the
wilderness looking for a decent MUA, I still occasionally launched
Eudora 6 to access ancient mail because the conversion tools for the
classic Eudora mailbox format all were a bit broken. It was not
until I found a program called "Emailchemy" (and got a couple of
minor bugs in it fixed) that I was able to convert my whole Eudora
archive cleanly into a form that actually worked with any modern
MUA. I chose to have Emailchemy convert to a form that it made
accessible via a trivial read-only IMAP server, but it can go to
other conversion formats that MM can import.
Good point. Fortunately, mailbox conversion will not be an issue for
me, I hope. I am planning to archive all my Eudora mailboxes in Mail
Archiver, which should give me easy enough access to past mail
preserving the old structure which I know well, and start Mailmate
fresh, with just the most recent mails. I have 19 years of mails in
Eudora and I don't believe that such a collection can transfer
cleanly, so I won't even try.
I resisted IMAP for a long time because Eudora made it feasible to
have multiple devices using the same account with only one of them
(my main personal Mac running Eudora) ever deleted anything. The
workflow definitely changes with IMAP, even with a single client,
because your definitive mailstore is the server. That forces a
change of mindset and for many people, a deep trust in a mail
provider. In my case, I run most of the IMAP servers I use and own
the most important one (and can put my hands on it 24x7) so the
trust issue is reduced. If you have shoddy or shady mail providers,
IMAP (and so MailMate) is problematic.
Yes, I am indeed painfully aware that some of my mail handling and
usage will have to change. Changing workflows that have been working
for years and developed to match the needs is not trivial, but must
be done sometimes. I can already see that I won't be able to use mail
as much for my to-do tasks and chores and may have to start using
some calendar or CRM program.
Throw some of that away. You can't need a million messages. :)
I do not keep all messages. The statistics show how much I received.
With mailing list posts, which is bulk of the volume, I read them
selectively (relying heavily on mail concatenation function of
Eudora) and delete anything unread after a year. I keep them for a
year in case I need to check quickly if a certain issue has been
raised or discussed lately. Select mails are shifted to "archive"
mailboxes which are meant to be kept as reference forever or at least
for a longer time.
MailMate does not currently handle the IMAP "\Recent" flag
correctly, so if you set it up to check mail on a slow POP-like
schedule, you have no automatic way to see "what was newly-arrived
in my last check." You could mimic that with the right combination
of rules attached to IMAP mailboxes and smart mailboxes, *I THINK*.
I have opened a bug on the \Recent flaw so maybe Benny will fix it
soon.
I would be fine if I can set a fixed time span when an email is
considered "new" and have smart mailboxes showing me where that is. I
guess I need to connect Mailmate to one of my higher traffic accounts
and see how that works. My initial testing was with two accounts that
have very low traffic.
Each account has its own default synch periodicity (5/10/30/60
minutes or manually only) and each IMAP mailbox can have its own
special synch schedule, including "Connected" mode, an IMAP feature
where the client sends an "IDLE" command within a mailbox and waits
for the server to tell it when there's any change.
I guess I need to dig deeper into the settings since I haven't seen
such a thing in Mailmate so far. Also, if the sync periodicity is not
matched across all mailboxes, it won't help me much. I need definite
time spans when no new mail comes at all.
With those warnings, I can imagine many reasons to NEED to move on
from Eudora and I can't name any other MacOS MUA that comes anywhere
close to being a fit replacement for Eudora with your sort of use.
Switching won't be easy and painless, but it would be better than
trying to switch to any other MacOS MUA.
Thanks for your feedback. Very useful.
One question: When I started Mailmate, it asked me to access my
Address Book, which I refused. I keep the mail-related addressbook
only in Eudora. The system addressbook serves a different purpose.
However, I do not see any menu items related to an addressbook in
Mailmate. Is it possible that it requires to use the system address
book or I am just not seeing it yet?
Robert
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