Java Glossary : Eudora

Java definitions: 0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You are here : home : Java Glossary : E words : Eudora.

A program for sending and receiving email. It allows filtering to automatically redirect mail from junk senders to the trash. It directs mail automatically to various inbaskets. It supports styled email (decorated with HTML tags), enclosures and attachments. It is reasonably bug free. It comes in three versions: free lite, free full with ads, full no ads. The ad version is unobtrusive if you have a fast connection. You can send suggestions to eudora-suggest@qualcomm.com and bugs to eudora-bugs@qualcomm.com. Usually installed in Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora.

The most important Eudora tip is to keep your inbox as empty as possible. The inbox is the mailbox most likely to become corrupted, the one hardest to recover, and the one that stops you dead in the water if it goes south. If you have not time to deal with the mail, just move it en masse to a todo box.

Be careful to avoid leading, trailing or embedded blanks in your mailbox names. It makes matching up files to mailboxes a bear, and DOS recovery operations unnecessarily clumsy.

Eudora is the program I use. I am not particularly happy with it, but the other email program stink much worse. It is much slower than other programs at picking up mail. Periodically it just crashes and crashes. All you can do is erase everything and start over. It is sometimes incapable of recovering from damaged files. The filters often don't filter. It suffers from featuritis, so that it is hard to find what you need its rabbit warren of menus. For example, you would never guess the way you get your nicknames expanded so you can be sure they worked is in the Tools | Options | Misc menu.

I don't like the way the background mail fetching chews up so many CPU cycles all foreground tasks grind to a halt. My second complaint is the excessive time it takes to present an empty email window to fill in. My third complaint is the excessive amount of time it takes to pick up the mail and to finish off picking up the mail. Most other programs are much faster. Now I have a faster computer, these shortcomings are far less onerous.

The import feature will import mailboxes from Eudora's competitors, but not from earlier versions of Eudora. To import your old mailboxes, shut down both old and new Eudoras, and copy the *.mbx, *.toc, filters.pce, NNDbase.txt and RCPDbase.txt files into the new Eudora directory. When Eudora wakes up it automatically converts the files to the new format.

If manual is ticked in a filter, that means the filter also works in manual mode. Without it, you can't use your filter to clean up old messages manually.

When Eudora sends or receives an attachment with a name already used in the recipient's attachment directory, it quietly renames the attachment. This can cause great confusion when people accidentally pick up the old version. To combat this, try to use a new, unique name for every attachment if the recipient uses Eudora.

You can delete a mailbox by deleting the *.mbx and *.toc file, along with the corresponding line in the descmap.pce file, or by using Tools | Mailboxes | right click | delete.

For help check the comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows newsgroup.

Custom Ports

Eudora 6.1 no longer lets you configure custom ports for you mailservers from the GUI. You can manually configure custom ports by adding lines to the Eudora.ini file in the appropriate personality sections for:

PopPort=110
SmtpPort=25

and copying extrastuff\esoteric.epi to the main eudora directory.

Configuring Tips

Configure Tools | Options | Incoming Mail | Untick leave Mail on Server.
Configure Tools | Options | Background Tasks | wait for 5 seconds | uncheck bring error window to front.
Configure Tools | Options | Getting Attention . Untick everything but play a sound to avoid annoying interruptions when new mail comes in. I suggest MS Office's WHOOSH.WAV. However, if you don't automatically open folders on incoming mail, it is easy to miss mail to the lesser used mailboxes.
Eudora's icon is not very suggestive of email. I modified mine by clicking properties, change icon and selecting the email icon out of opera.exe.

Personality Name Order

Eudora sorts the personalities in alphabetical order, but using a case-sensitive sort. So all lower case letters come after all upper case letters. You can change the order by manually renaming your personalities in eudora.ini (while Eudora is not running). For example, change these two lines:

Persona0=Persona-shaw bulk
[Persona-shaw bulk]

Persona0=Persona-Shaw bulk
[Persona-Shaw bulk]

The numbering order does not matter, neither does the order of the Persona0=Persona-Shaw bulk entries nor the order of the [Persona-Shaw bulk] sections.

Backup and Recovery

If Eudora fails, first try shutting it down, and deleting all the *.toc files and then restarting Eudora. If that fails, restore from backup.

Make sure you back up your mailboxes (the *.mbx and *.toc files), your filters ( filters.pce), your address book ( NNdbase.txt), your recipient nicknames ( RCPdbase.txt) and your configuration settings ( eudora.ini). descmap.pce contains a list of your mailbox files. You might as well back up the entire Eudora directory and all its subdirectories. As always, don't back up corrupt files on top of your only good backup.

You can restore any of these files simply by dragging backup copies back into the Eudora directory when Eudora is not running. You can add new mailboxes by manually editing descmap.pce or by creating new files in Tools | Mailbox. If you are trying to recover a damaged inbox, you may have better luck if you create a lost.mbx file without any lost.toc file, and put your mail to recover there. Create a dummy lost mailbox first with Tools | Mailbox then overwrite it when Eudora is not running. Alternatively, Put an entry for lost.mbx in descmap.pce. You can delete a mailbox by deleting the *.mbx and *.toc file, along with the corresponding line in the descmap.pce file, or by using Tools | Mailboxes | right click | delete.

You can discard the backup *.001 and *.002 files.

Snapshot the files to backup this way.

REM save Eudora guts
echo snapping Eudora ...
md! C:\env\snap\eudora
C:
CD "c:\program files\eudora"
copy eudora.ini C:\env\snap\eudora
copy descmap.pce C:\env\snap\eudora
copy *.mbx C:\env\snap\eudora
copy *.toc C:\env\snap\eudora
copy sigs\standard.txt C:\env\snap\eudora
copy sigs\standard.txt C:\env\snap\eudora\eudora.sig
REM eudora address list
copy NNdbase.toc C:\env\snap\eudora
copy NNdbase.txt C:\env\snap\eudora
copy RCPdbase.txt C:\env\snap\eudora
REM filters
copy *.pce C:\env\snap\eudora

Restore these files when Eudora is not running. If that fails, try deleting the *.toc files and restarting Eudora.

email ¤ mailserver

home	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[24.87.56.253]
	Your IP:[80.134.30.163]
	You are visitor number 1420.
	Please send errors, omissions and suggestions
	to improve this page to Roedy Green.
	You can get a fresh copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive mirror:
	http://mindprod.com/jgloss/eudora.html	J:\mindprod\jgloss\eudora.html