What are people using for MUA's nowadays?

[Brett Glass]

At 10:14 AM 9/22/2003, Brad Knowles wrote:

>         If you want a GUI MUA that incorporates anti-spam features, I 
> highly recommend Eudora 6.

Eudora has a nice interface. However, it does also have some problems:

1) Searching for text and messages is slow and hogs memory. (A simple 
search can cause your system to run out of free RAM and start to thrash.)

2) Attachments are "detached" from messages and all stored in ONE SINGLE 
DIRECTORY instead of in the mailbox where the message is stored. This 
makes for a huge, cluttered mess in the directory of attachments, and 
also makes it difficult for other MUAs to import the mail if you decide 
you want to switch (more on this below). Metadata about messages is 
likewise stored in an index file in a proprietary format. Losing the 
index file associated with a mailbox can be a disaster, as can corruption 
of an index file (which can happen as a result of a system crash).

3) Very few MUAs can successfully import mail from Eudora. Mozilla and 
Opera fail, most of the time, when they try. So, you may be locked in. 
And since Eudora runs only on a limited number of platforms, your e-mail 
usage may be locked into those platforms forever after.

4) The user interface is governed by an INI file which contains many 
entries in a cryptic and undocumented format. If the INI file gets 
corrupted, the user interface can literally go berserk -- with windows 
that you cannot control or manipulate. This has happened a few times to me.

5) Qualcomm now has close ties to Microsoft, and so uses the Internet 
Explorer rendering engine in Eudora. This opens the door to all sorts of 
malware. If you turn off the use of MSIE, many messages in HTML format 
won't render correctly.

I have been using Eudora for years, but will likely switch away as soon 
as I can find an MUA that will import from it correctly.

--Brett Glass