Mailforge v Eudora

As I mentioned in an earlier post (for details read the comment thread), I recently switched my email program from Eudora, which I had used for many years but which is not supported by Lion, the newest version of OSX, to MailForge, a Mozilla email program designed to feel like Eudora. Lion is being released today, so it seems an appropriate time to record the result of the experiment.

When MailForge works it works better than Eudora did, but there are a variety of minor ways in which it doesn't work, although none so far that is a real killer. Having downloaded mail once, it refuses to do it again until I quit and reload the program, at which point it turns out that there is additional mail to be downloaded. I have it set to automatically open a mailbox with new mail in it, but it doesn't. It has an address book to which I can add a group of email addresses with a nickname but as far as I can tell doing so has no effect; the new group does not appear in the address book thereafter.

To be fair, some of these problems might be due to Eudora files that I imported into MailForge; after most of twenty years of copying files from one machine to another, some—I am thinking in particular of some of the filters I looked at—pretty clearly had been corrupted in one way or another. Initially filtering didn't work; after I went through the filters removing the corrupt ones it did. I should do something similar with my address book and see if it fixes that problem.

And, to be fair, when MailForge works it is faster and smoother than Eudora was. With my old Eudora, if I selected a group of emails and hit delete, sometimes they vanished, sometimes I got an error message. With MailForge they vanish. And I am pretty sure that the actual download of the email is faster. 

But I expect that there are more glitches waiting to bite me, that the reports which made me initially unsure whether MailForge was the right solution—roughly speaking that it wasn't yet quite ready for prime time—were correct. Whether I would have been better off with my alternate plan of converting to Thunderbird, a better developed fork off the same open source project but one not designed specifically for Eudora users, I don't know.

Next project: Take a look at Lion and see whether I want the upgrade. If I do, wait a few weeks on general principles and get it. While resisting all temptation to replace my perfectly good, indeed beautiful, elegant, amazingly tiny, MacBook Air, with the faster model Apple has just released—this time with a lighted keyboard.

I don't suppose my son needs a slightly used ultralight to take off to college ...  .