New Eudora beta improves functionality

A new Eudora beta popped up the other day: 6.2b4. Eudora have also set up a forum, specifically to discuss this beta. I always use the beta versions of Eudora as I’ve always found them very stable. This beta adds some interesting things, such as displaying emoticons, and a pop-up menu to add them into your own messages. You can, of course, choose not to use this feature.

While that’s entirely trivial, the new ScamWatch may have its uses.

Eudora now features URL protection, which makes it easy to determine if a
URL is legitimate before you click on it. You will be warned if the URL is
potentially deceptive.

There’s better IMAP support, and you can launch iChat from the Eudora Address Book. The Dock Icon shows the number of unread messages, as does the Command Tab application switcher display. On the other hand, this is the first release without support for the Classic OS.

Now, here are the two big things for me. Shift Space scrolls up, just like in my web browser and other software!!!! This has been a huge source of annoyance for me while reading email, especially when my fingers get ahead of my eyes and I scroll down before I’ve finished reading what’s on the screen. Now, at last, I can scroll back up without fumbling for the scrollbars.

Secondly, I recently trained some Mac users on using Entourage. I’m not a big fan of Entourage myself but there was one feature I liked (in v2004) – the ability to set up “views” which would update live. Since that time I’ve changed how I read email in Eudora. Previously I would allow Eudora to open any mailbox into which mail arrived. Then I’d look at each mailbox and read the messages. That system worked well for years.

In order to mimic the Entourage feature I set up a couple of searches and saved them (before executing a search). That allowed me to identify, for example, all unread mail in mailboxes of particular interest and read it from there. Each time I checked mail though I would need to run the search again to gather fresh messages. This beta adds Live Updating to the search results so if mail arrives you’ll see it appear in the Search results. And searching, previously very fast, now seems even faster.

And, the Filter Report now seems to report on messages arriving in the InBox. I also note that if I hover over a link in the Filter report, and certain other places, a yellow Tooltip appears.

If you have OS X and use Eudora then try out the new betas (6.4Mb download). Note that if you’re a paid user and your year’s subscription is up you may need to pay for another year in order to use the beta.