Monday, February 28, 2011

Eudora 7.1.0.9 under Windows 7, vs Eudora OSE

So I am finally building a nice Windows 7 machine to replace the old reliable Dell 670 which is my main workstation. The 670 BTW just got brought back to life, sort of, but that's another post topic.

Yes, Eudora 7.1.0.9 (now called 'Eudora Classic') CAN be used under Windows 7. See
this Eudora forum post for some tips and helpful  links. More relevant: I just installed  Eudora Classic under Winodws 7, pointed it at the NAS folder holding all my mail, and it seems to be off and running.

Eudora OSE is an enhanced wrapper around Thunderbird, but also includes changes to Thunderbird, if I understand the remarks at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Eudora_OSE

I run it this way (mail files on NAS) so that they get back up along with other data, and also so that another PC on the company network can access the files if my desktop is down or otherwise occupied.

The OSE version looks promising but lacks some of the Classic features I have come to like: e.g., outgoing mail filters, cascading of open mail folders, right-clicking to make a current mail the basis for a new filter, etc. OSE documentation leaves a lot to be desired. I would be happy to help write some of that if I can first figure out how to get OSE usable enough for me.

Classic also has some bugs/issues (automatic filters don't seem to work correctly for me; I have to periodically manually filter my main in-boxes to get it all filtered) and it sometimes crashes and then spends forever rebuilding indexes. And it just seems like I should upgrade. But in the meantime I have to get work done...

So maybe I will try OSE on a home Win7-64 machine and hope that the rough edges get smoothed soon.

Some users reported that they had to manually install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 runtime to get Classic to work under Windows 7 64 bit, but I didn't.