Network Computing 
Issue 24 - June 2000
Why Upgrade to Eudora 4?
By Edmond Cheung

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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:

  8. 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.

  9. 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:

POP3

IMAP

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.

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.

All messages as well as their attachments will be downloaded into PC during the 'Check New E-mail' process.

Full message will be downloaded only when it is opened for display from its content. Attachment will be downloaded when it is invoked.

Mailboxes can only be created on PC. There is only one mailbox (INBOX or NEWMAIL) exists on the server.

Multiple mailboxes can be created on the PC as well as on the server.

Filters can transfer incoming/outgoing messages to local mailboxes only.

Filters can transfer incoming/outgoing messages to other mailboxes irrespective of their location (on the server or the PC).

Outgoing e-mail can be stored locally on the PC only.

Outgoing e-mail can be filtered to a mailbox on the server for accessibility from other machine.

It is inconvenient to clean up your mailboxes on the server.

Messages can be deleted directly from the server. This makes it more convenient to clean up your mailboxes on the server.

Provided by all versions of Eudora.

Only Provided by Eudora version 4 or above.

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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