What is Eudora Pro 3.x?

Eudora has been the benchmark in Internet E-mail since its release as freeware several years ago, but it was starting to show its age when Claris Emailer arrived last year and offered some much-needed competition. The commercial release of Eudora Pro 3.0 smooths out the rough edges of the program’s interface, improves mail handling, and makes the program more convenient to use. It doesn’t pioneer many new features, though; this feels more like a minor revision than a major upgrade.

Eudora Pro’s most dramatic improvement lies in its mail filtering. This feature lets you apply a set of rules to incoming or outgoing mail; for example, I set up a filter that takes incoming mail from macworld.com, sets it to high priority, labels and colors it, plays a sound, and files the message in a special mailbox. You can create any number of filters, and you can even apply filters manually to any messages (Emailer’s Mail Actions aren’t as flexible as Eudora Pro’s, and they filter mail only as it’s received). Missing is the option to take action if the sender is (or is not) in the address book, a filter that’s present in Emailer.

Eudora Pro relieves the stark user interface of its predecessors by adding a configurable tool bar with icons denoting the program’s common commands. Still, the interface could be charitably described as no-nonsense (or, not so charitably, as just plain ugly). The address book is another improvement, but it’s still vastly inferior to Claris Emailer’s. Eudora requires a nickname for every address and forbids spaces or punctuation in the nickname. When you enter a partial nickname in the To field of a new message, Eudora won’t complete the name unless you use a menu or keyboard command (Emailer guesses and completes the name as you type), Emailer can easily handle multiple E-mail accounts for an addressee, and while you’re addressing the mail you can choose which account to send the message to; with Eudora you have to use a separate address-book entry You can drag and drop addresses from Eudora’s address book into a message, but you can’t drag addresses from messages into the address book to create a new entry. And while the manual says you can create a mail group by selecting several addresses and using a menu command, repeated attempts to do this crashed my Mac.

One nice improvement is that Eudora Pro now colors and underlines URLs in messages, and ⌘-clicking on an URL launches the appropriate application. And Qualcomm has made several other small but welcome improvements: the program no longer slices messages larger than 32K into smaller messages; it now supports styled text in messages sent to mail clients that understand the “text/enriched” MIME standard (which, at the moment, means only other Eudora Pro users); the Find command has been enhanced, making it easier to search multiple mailboxes; you can now append any number of signatures to messages; and the program ships with Working Software’s Spellswell 7, a spelling checker chat works from within other applications.

The Last Word

Eudora Pro is a very good Internet E-mail client, and longtime Eudora users should be happy with this upgrade. But in spite of the powerful mail filtering and improved interface, nothing here is compelling enough to tempt Claris Emailer users to switch.

Negrino, Tom. (November 1996). Eudora Pro 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 77).

Download Eudora Pro 3.x for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K + PPC (FAT)

At least 1.8MB of free RAM

Mac OS 7.0 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver