Imitation, not innovation, is the key to this version
For one day, Qualcomm became a household name - this year's Superbowl, the most watched sporting event of the year and also the stage of some of the greatest commercials of all time, like Apple's 1984 commercial, was played at Qualcomm Park in San Diego. Although the Superbowl and its Budweiser commercials may be unforgettable, the name of the stadium won't; but Qualcomm doesn't need a Superbowl ad for Eudora, their e-mail program with a user base of over 18 million world wide.
Is version 4.0 of Eudora Pro a whole new program, or an attempt to squeeze a few million more dollars out of previous versions' reputations, which tends to happen at the end of a program's life cycle? It seems like a mix of both. On one hand, Qualcomm added some great new features, but on the other hand they're features that should have been included a long time ago, many of which are rip offs of rival email program Claris Emailer.
Eudora 4.0 is a bit less rude than previous versions. Before, if you were checking or sending mail, you couldn't do anything else. It was very annoying to sit through a lengthy download just to get to the rest of the mail buried in your mailbox. Likewise, I always dreaded e-mailing files to people because it could tie Eudora up for hours on end, and you can't stop the transfer and continue it at a later time. Now, you can do anything you want while Eudora checks and downloads your mail, including sending any outgoing messages. But both these are features Claris Emailer has had from the start.
Why didn't I think of that? For those of us who are too lazy to type in someone's e-mail address, Eudora's address book has a new feature. Once you type in someone's address 
and give them a nickname, all you have to do is begin typing the nickname in any address field, and Eudora will complete it for you. Now, instead of typing "mishas@earthlink.net" to e-mail the editor, all I have to type is "m" and the rest is done for me. How efficient, although once again Eudora has failed to be the innovator in the e-mail field and simply mimicked its Claris counterpart. For those of you who prefer to use your mouse, you can begin an e-mail with the address field already filled out by choosing "New Message To" instead of "New Message," then selecting the address book entry for the person or persons you want to e-mail. Similar choices exist for forwarding and redirecting (similar to forwarding, but the original sender's name remains in the "From" field).
With many new versions of programs comes a sparkling new interface - and Eudora is no exception. Instead of just making the interface more graphical and fancy, Qualcomm made it more logical. Letters no longer designate whether mail has been read, replied to, forwarded, or a number of other actions, but have been replaced with graphics - backward arrow for replied, forward arrow for forwarded, etc. Also new are fancy graphics for the tool bar across the top of the in box which blend with the Platinum appearance of MacOS 8, replacing the black and white ones previous versions sported.
A feature that can make or break an e-mail program is the use of multiple e-mail addresses. Many people have several addresses, and in the case of home computers, several people use the same computer and e-mail program. In previous versions, Eudora users were forced to create a separate preference file stored somewhere outside of the system folder, then double-click the settings file to launch Eudora and check their e-mail. This gave E-mailer, which even lets you check AOL mailboxes (and gives you much more functionality than AOL's standard mail component), a significant advantage over Eudora in the eyes of people who needed this feature. However, in recent versions Qualcomm fixed this major problem, and the result is everything I could hope for. All of your e-mail is stored in one in box and out box, so you see it all at once (and you can easily pick out the important messages to reply to immediately). When you send a message, you can chose from a pop-up menu which address you want in the "From" field (which you cannot normally change). This menu is a bit out of place in the otherwise all-text window, and would probably look better in the tool bar across the top of the window, but in its current positioning it is easily seen and serves as a reminder to you to choose the right address. In fact, inside the message window would probably be the best place to put a ".sig" menu. I don't even use a .sig now because I don't want to accidentally use a casual one (for the end of e-mail to friends) on a business letter, and vice versa. I don't want to add a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the end of an e-mail to Qualcomm, and my PC-using friends don't want to hear that I'm the managing editor of Macinsoft.
An important feature to note is Eudora's support for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption. Pretty good is perhaps an understatement - PGP encryption is so strong that it was almost banned, and exporting it to foreign countries is illegal (in fact, the author had some trouble with the law over it). It is the most effective way of ensuring that a message can only be read by someone who has the key to decode it. PGP is used by web sites like MacNN to protect their contributors.
Eudora is quite obviously nearing the end of its life and Qualcomm is just running out of ideas for new versions, as is clear by the abundance of imitation and lack of innovation. This is an excellent program to buy if you currently use either Netscape's or Microsoft's mail programs, but current Eudora users will be disappointed and unsatisfied, because they already use the best e-mail program around, and this one isn't significantly better.
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