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Issue
24 - June 2000
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Why Upgrade
to Eudora 4?
By
Edmond
Cheung
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Eudora 3 has been used
inside the CityU for more than two years now. It may be a good
time now to upgrade it to a newer version, Eudora 4. The Computing
Services Centre (CSC) has been testing this new version and finds
many new features and advantages over the old one.
Eudora 4 brings you a new user interface
as well as some powerful and user-friendly functions that enable
you to manage your e-mail more comfortably. Among the new features
provided, some major ones are:
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Background Sending
and Receiving E-mail
Now the process of sending and receiving e-mail is working in
the background. That means you can continue your work inside
Eudora 4 without waiting for it to finish, e.g., retrieving
a large e-mail.
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Automatic Spell
Check
When you type in the composition window, Eudora 4 checks the
message content for misspelling and grammatical errors automatically.
Any misspelled words will be underlined immediately.
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Improved Search/Find
You can search for text in messages located in one or more mailboxes
and folders. The new searching function allows you to specify
up to five levels of searching criteria.
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Automatic Name
Completion in Directory Services
When you look up a name using the Directory Services and type
in one or more keys, a drop-down list appears that enables you
to select a previously entered name. Thus, you can fill in the
information more quickly and conveniently.
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Personality Selection
In Eudora 4, you can access your e-mail from several e-mail
accounts at the same time. All you have to do is to set up each
account (termed as ‘Personality’ inside Eudora) separately
by adding it in the Personalities Window. At the time of sending
e-mail, you can choose which personality you want to be on the
fly, e.g., select it from the ‘From’ field of your
outgoing e-mail. Although ‘Personality’ exists in
Eudora 3, it is more convenient to use now because in Eudora
3, you need to go to the Personalities Window and select it
explicitly before composing your e-mail.
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Import Address
Book and Messages
You can import your address book and messages from other e-mail
programs such as Netscape Messenger and Outlook Express.
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IMAP Support
Besides providing POP3 support for retrieving e-mail, Eudora
4 also provides IMAP support for storing and manipulating mailboxes
and e-mail folders on the e-mail server (rather than inside
the local hard disk). This allows you to easily clean up your
mailboxes on the e-mail server in case your mailbox quota has
reached its limit.
In addition to the above,
there are some more features from Eudora version 4.3 as follows:
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Auto-wrapping
Plain Text Messages
If somebody composes a plain text message using Eudora 4.3 (with
or without word wrap enabled) and sends it to you, you will
find the message being adjusted to the display width of your
computer. That means you can always get a legible e-mail displayed
no matter how you change the width of your message window. In
the previous version, the message may not be displayed legibly
after you changed the size of your message window. This also
works for replied and forwarded messages.
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Automatic Name
Completion
When you fill in the information of your message recipient inside
the ‘To:’, ‘Cc:’, or ‘Bcc’ field,
Eudora 4.3 will complete the name for you automatically based
on the historical information from the past.
Among those mentioned features provided
by Eudora 4, the most important one is the IMAP support for accessing
e-mail accounts. Eudora 4 enables you to access your POP3 and
IMAP accounts simultaneously. Using IMAP to access your accounts
has some advantages over POP3. The differences between these two
working mechanisms are summarised in the following table:
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POP3
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IMAP
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Since this mechanism needs to download e-mail into
personal computer (PC) before displaying them, you may have
the following problems for POP3 access:
- You need to download all e-mail again when using another PC to check your
e-mail.
- May get confused if you need to check e-mail from two or more different
PCs, e.g., both in the office and at home.
The downloaded e-mail may be deleted from the server
depending on the setting of your e-mail client. Once deleted
from the server, you cannot check them again from a different
PC if you have not downloaded them to it before.
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Since e-mail is kept on the server, you gain the following
benefits for IMAP access:
- No need to download all e-mail when using a different PC to check your
e-mail.
- Easier to identify the unread e-mail.
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All messages as well as their attachments will be
downloaded into PC during the 'Check New E-mail' process.
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Full message will be downloaded only when it is opened
for display from its content. Attachment will be downloaded
when it is invoked.
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Mailboxes can only be created on PC. There is only
one mailbox (INBOX or NEWMAIL) exists on the server.
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Multiple mailboxes can be created on the PC as well
as on the server.
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Filters can transfer incoming/outgoing messages to
local mailboxes only.
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Filters can transfer incoming/outgoing messages to
other mailboxes irrespective of their location (on the server
or the PC).
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Outgoing e-mail can be stored locally on the PC only.
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Outgoing e-mail can be filtered to a mailbox on the
server for accessibility from other machine.
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It is inconvenient to clean up your mailboxes on the
server.
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Messages can be deleted directly from the server.
This makes it more convenient to clean up your mailboxes
on the server.
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Provided by all versions of Eudora.
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Only Provided by Eudora version 4 or above.
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Migration to Eudora 4 will be available
for CityU staff in the near future. The CSC will keep you informed
on the exact launching date.
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