Eudora v4.0 review for MacUser. November 1997. Phil Gyford. It doesn't seem long since Qualcomm's Eudora was the sole choice for anyone serious about their email. This simple era didn't last for long, however, and these days Eudora has to fight for its position against Claris Emailer and the mail components of the swiftly evolving Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Eudora offers all the features any self-respecting email program should have these days: the ability to access a number of different email accounts; an address book; the use of stationery; spell checking (using the included Spellswell dictionary); and filters for treating mail in vast numbers of ways depending on your own rules (for example, sending a canned response to your boss's rants, while alerting you to the arrival of the latest missive from your online love by playing a sound, colouring the message red and generally making a fuss). So what's new in version 4? The major feature missing from this beta release is support for IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) in addition to the standard, but ageing, POP (Post Office Protocol). Once there are more service providers supporting IMAP, this will be a major bonus for those who check their mail from a number of locations, as it's designed for storing and organising messages on the server. There will also be support for LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), which allows you to quickly search online directories such as Bigfoot (http://www.bigfoot.com/) to find email addresses. As welcome as they are, both these trumpeted improvements to Eudora have already been implemented in Netscape's mail component. All well and good, but what's changed that most of us will notice from day to day? Sadly, not enough. For such a major upgrade (from v3.1.1 to v4), there's surprisingly little that's new, which is particularly disappointing in the areas where Eudora was beginning to show its age. It has all the signs of an application whose admirable array of features has outgrown the original design. For example, while one of the best things about Eudora is the ability to customise a vast array of its features, this results in 22 pages of initially bewildering preferences to flip through which should be rationalised into fewer, more comprehensive screens. And if you're really up for a bit of tweaking, you can install the Esoteric Settings, which give you access to a further 13 pages worth of obscure checkboxes and numbers. Other additions include the ability to use HTML to style the text in messages (handy if you know your correspondents have the same ability), and the 'Make Filter' command. Organising your mail with filters is essential if you get more than a handful of messages a day, but the amount of choice Eudora provides can be confusing to the beginner. Choosing 'Make Filter' brings up a simple window containing a guess at some filtering rules based on the currently selected message. If such simplification could be performed on other parts of the program, such as the confusing Find window, this would go a long way to making Eudora rather more friendly. One new introduction that should make the program more easy to use is the option to pick up and send mail in the background. Previously, this meant access to the rest of the application was disabled - frustrating if you wanted to write an email while you downloaded all your mail. However, even this welcome introduction has its flaws; while collecting and sending mail can happen in the background, actually filtering it has to take place in the foreground, and it won't happen until the program is idle for a minute (or you press the less than obvious key combination of cmd-opt-j). Aside from defeating the point of background processing, it's rather disconcerting when you see your mail being collected, and then it fails to immediately appear in mailboxes. Although Eudora is still an admirable application, it's certainly showing its age compared to more modern and friendly looking competitors. Its mail management is still second to none, and if you simply want power and aren't concerned about a slightly erratic interface, Eudora is still the way to go. But Qualcomm have much further to go if they want to re-establish it at the top of the heap.