I’ve been using email programs for the last 15 years on an almost day to day basis. While I definitely don’t hold the record for how long I’ve been using them, I have been using email for almost the entire era since the Internet became popular (graphs I’ve seen show 1994-1995 is when there became a huge influx of users). Over that time, I’ve used a number of email programs and worked with a bunch more through my NotifyMail program. For a very long time, I used Eudora (1992-2002, I think) and even had the opportunity to be on the development team for a few years. Eudora had a ton of features and has an extremely loyal following. I gave up on Eudora a few years back because I wanted to have a central address book and Apple’s Mail offered that along with iSync. Mail doesn’t have all the features that Eudora has, but frankly, I can’t even recall what I’m missing. Also, Eudora’s interface was years out of date and user interface is extremely important to me.
Recently, it was announced that Eudora was going to be re-born as an open source project and I’ve seen people real happy about this. I just don’t understand why. Mail does a fine job for 95% of the Mac users, but some people are just stubborn. If you think people are stubborn about Eudora, I received an email today with the following at the top: “Claris Emailer 2.0v3, January 22, 1998”. Whoa, using an 8 year old email program is almost asking for trouble as lots of things have changed and matured with respect to email.
There will never be pleasing everyone, especially with software.