> “If an e-mail program can survive the merciless scrutiny of the internet community, it’s got to be good,”
How comes email managed to federate multiple incompatible systems (MCI,MS Mail,X.400,etc.)
into an open RFC standard, where other protocols (instant messaging in particular) failed?
Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important.
Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
AIM was not a unified IM system. For starters, they made it hard to sign up outside the US (the sign up form needed a valid zip code). As a result MSN was more popular in Western Europe, and I get the impression that ICQ took the lead in Eastern Europe.
(until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
Msn messenger didn't become popular until XP shipped. At that point MS made it load on boot and nag you about signing up. And at that point ICQ had been around for years.
I don't think Apple so much as dropped support for AIM as much as AIM dropped support for its more-open OSCAR protocol -- the same thing that apps like Pidgin used to connect to AIM.
The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.
Very much agree with your comment here...but I'd add that the thinking behind email was to idealistically connect people, while IM was to connect people specifically for the purposes of making money, building a business, etc. I wish the feeling behind email still existed, at least in an altruistic sense...Nowadays, it seems like everyone is simply jumping on whatever platform is the hottest of the moment. My daughter and her friends constantly have to jump between a handful of proprietary "messaging" platforms to contact each other...and of course as a curmudgeon Dad, i remind her that "in my day", we would just ping each other via email, and we liked it by gum! ;-) Seriously though, I sure hope we all standardize on something like matrix.org (the protocol) for both short-term/fast-paced (IM/chat-style) messaging as well as the longer form style of classic email. One platform (and client) - based on something like matrix - to rule all of my messaging needs would be so awesome!
IM has a longer history than you might think. You could send instant messages to people on your network, long before there was anything commercial about it.
IM functions have existed on systems for a very long time. Some of them even had groups and various permissions associated with that. On top of that, there were overall user permissions with varied levels. They could send messages to other people in their same usergroups. An example would be /wallops or /globops, and similar commands. You still see that functionality built into things like IRC servers and some clients. There was also a /msg{user} command. There were also messages sent to the operator on duty, and things like that.
So, this doesn't detract from your overall point. I just figured you should know that IM wasn't created as a business, so much as it was a way to communicate with other people. It would be many years before people sought a profit in it, the monitorization of it was a bit later than that. The first monetization efforts, that I remember, were in selling products (and services) that made it easier on internal networks. For a while, Novell was pretty big in that space, but they weren't the first.
IM has quite a history. Someone should write a book on it.
IRC wasn't even the beginning. Chance are, your OS still retains a message user function buried in it. Good ones would even store your messages when you were offline. They would save them to what some termed their wall. If you had permissions, then you'd be able to message whole groups of users. You might even be able to give a broad message to everyone called the MotD.
I'm not sure of the absolute beginnings, but there has probably been IM since they first networked two computers together. It was probably the second thing they wrote and the first message was probably a fart joke.
At that time, there wasn't much commercial interest in having e-mail fragmented. For messengers, no company wanted to give up their users and their things. For a while, multi-clients like Pidgin, Miranda or Trillian sort of fixed that for users, now we pretty much seem to be back to darker ages in that regard, thanks to tons of messengers being based on "one mobile device per account" models.
You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)
In my time I have had high hopes for the following: WebRTC, XMPP, Zephyr, Ricochet, or one of the commercial protocols becoming standard. I now have high hopes for RCS and Matrix, but I'm not terribly optimistic.
It was the one I used the most as it was the first that really permitted me to save every email from 1996 through to around 2007 when I finally migrated all of my email onto Gmail (I'd kept a Windows machine around solely to use The Bat! and decided to go all-in on webmail once Gmail was capable enough).
Simple for PGP, complex filtering, fast search over tens of thousands of emails, fast retrieval, great UI. It was great.
Gosh, I loved Eudora! I used it into the 2000s. Eventually was (forcibly) migrated to Outlook at work, and Gmail came along in 2004 to convert me off of desktop mail clients at home.
Seeing the picture of that box brought back memories (such as when software came in boxes!)
firefox and thunderbird they are usually mention at same time,but now only firefox got the attention. No one care thunderbird anymore. Webmail turn to main stream.
I somewhat care, in that I still want a desktop email client, but they all kinda suck and Thunderbird is no exception. It's slow and the GUI is rather flaky (and subjectively rather messy).
Every new email client seems to be more interested in re-inventing email that providing a simple straight forward client for "old school" usage.
Currently I use Apples email client, not that I absolutely love it or don't think it could be better, it's just the least no nonsense client currently available.
Thunderbird fails to deliver, for me at least, the same feeling of a well designed powerful application that Firefox does in the browser space.
I used Courier Email a lot during that era. It was the time receiving an email still could mean a valuable communication from somebody you actually cared about. Those mails were cherished in a specialized mail client and given a permanent place on your hard drive.
Oh how I miss Eudora. It’s the only thing I actually miss from back in my days of using Windows. Thunderbird was never an adequate replacement, and now I sadly use Apple mail and curse it every day.
Well I still use Eudora, it's installed on this laptop that I'm using now. Anyone who has used Eudora knows it is the best email client around and it's a damn tragedy that Qualcomm abandoned it.
Because Qualcomm stopped development over a decade ago certain features are problematic these days, certificates updates and the lack of a decent HTML editor for example.
That means that I also have to use Mozilla's Thunderbird for some jobs.
Let me say this categorically: Thunderbird isn't in the race with Eudora. It would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly bad Thunderbird is by comparison. If Thunderbird or any other open source client is ever to catch up with Eudora then a huge amount of work will need to be done.
There is one thing I've never understood about classic well designed software and that is why are supposed clones such as Thunderbird so inferior to the original. One would think Thunderbird's designers would simply copy the Eudora paradigm and correct its out of date features on the way.
Well it's not so with Thunderbird. Perhaps someone knows the reason why.
Anyway, Eudora is on my machine to stay for the time being. It'll be there until the POP/IMAP protocol ceases to work!
It's remarkable that you didn't just tick the box to show hidden files and directories, along with unticking the box to hide extensions on known file types. Back when I used Windows, those were the first settings I changed. (There was one more in that same section, but I've forgotten it.)
Anyhow, backup and restoration was both possible and pretty easy:
While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.
(For a number of years, I was awarded the Microsoft MVP in Shell/User, IE/OE, and Security categories. The latter only awarded twice as I stopped helping and went back to Linux, sort of returning to my roots which were in Unix.)
> It's remarkable that you didn't just tick the box to show hidden files and directories
Of course I did, how do you think I found them? :-) BTW, I talked to support on the phone about this, they told me that backup/restore was not supported by OE and I was on my own with it.
> While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.
Oh, I eventually did figure out how to back it up and restore it. My point is this is something the application itself should be able to do. It's a fundamental thing it should do.
As for the proprietary binary format, it turns out that Thunderbird said it could import it. I breathed a sigh of relief when it did so successfully. I should not have to rely on 3rd party tools to backup/restore/decode critical data for my business.
With TB there was no longer any reason to put up with that.
BTW, I have files going back 40 years, and email archives going back 25 years. The machines and programs that worked with those files are long gone. I prefer to store things as text files for long term storage, as much as possible, or at least the most common file formats like jpg.
Storing in a binary, proprietary format just isn't acceptable.
P.S. I used a bunch of file compressors back in the DOS days, and before DOS died I uncompressed all of those archives and stored the uncompressed files.
P.P.S. Thanks for taking the time to write out the tips, I hope there are others this can help.
Eudora is a major reason my home desktop is still on OS X 10.6.
Not mentioned in the article is that Eudora was a multi-window program, modelled after the Macintosh (spatial) Finder, making it easy to see and manage multiple mail folders (typically filter-generated, for mailing lists or important contacts) and messages together. Seemingly every other client imitates Outlook's single peephole view.
I'm genuinely curious to read that book. I used pine until about 2004 before I lost access to it and migrated to webmail more or less permanently. Perhaps my email usage is plain compared to yours? I still fire up Thunderbird to archive my mail, but that's it. I still pine for pine sometimes (I couldn't resist), but I have to imagine some of that is rose colored glasses.
I started using it when I was in school (probably around 7th grade) and we were given shell accounts on a server somewhere. I used it that way until I left university in 2004. After that I needed to set up a new email account and started using webmail. I also wasn't regularly telneting into a shell so didn't really have access. The things that made it really good: threading, keywords (basically tags), and keyboard navigation were done pretty well in gmail. It also had good filtering. But I feel like I need support for images and HTML, even if I hate those things in email.
I finally gave up on keeping Eudora working a few years ago, but I still haven't found anything nearly as good. I think the 2 best features were:
-Performance. It was fast as hell even on old equipment, downright instantaneous on modern hardware. Everything was fast, sorting vast amounts of email, searching, you name it.
-Alt-click to bring related emails together. Meet to see all emails from one particular person? Alt-click on their name/address in the email list. Want to instead see all emails with a certain subject? Alt-click on the subject. Faster and less error prone than typing.
Yeah, Gmail's threading is OK most of the time but try managing a thread where you email a group and get a mix of direct responses and reply-all responses. I inevitably end up missing an important response every time, and it's a real pain in the ass to go back and find one particular response.
i had used Eudora, The Bat!, Balsa, Thunderbird and probably some more i have forgotten about since then. mutt has left all of them in the dust, Eudora included.
I switched to Thunderbird because it stores the emails in a plain text file. This gives me access to the email archive even if the TB executable is no longer available.
My #1 dislike with TB is there is no backup/restore method. There is export/import for the address book, but not for the entire database. Instead it stores things in randomly named directories - madness.
Despite my comments re HTML I solidly agree with you, HTML in emails is mostly a damn nuisance. Unfortunately, everyone expects pretty formatting these days, and it seems HTML is the default.
I see no immediate solution to the HTML problem. The fact is that producing a good HTML editor turns out to be extremely difficult, so invariably the implementations in email clients are generally only poor subsets of the spec, moreover, no two HTML editors produce anything like similar code/output for any given tag, etc.
> But in the end, only the power users stuck around
"Power user" would be the last term I'd use to describe Eudora users in the mid-2000s at the university where I did tech support. They were generally emeritus professors who had to be instructed whether each click was a left-click or a right-click.
Supporting Eudora was such an absolute nightmare that we had a help desk party when official campus support was terminated. It was an unstable, opaque mess of an email client compared to its 21st century contemporaries.
I never used Eudora, but I use Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed Claws) and it sounds like it has a lot of the same features. Very customizable, powerful mail filtering, and an ancient UI. :-P
Eudora was my first introduction to email! This would have been around 1994 or 1995, on Macintosh System 7.
When you had new mail, a dialog popped up with a picture of a rooster holding a letter in its beak. If you checked your mail and didn't have any, the dialog would show a picture of a snake. After searching the internet for screenshots of these for years, I finally found them! http://old.accesscom.com/support/macintosh/mac-eudora2.html
45 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadHow comes email managed to federate multiple incompatible systems (MCI,MS Mail,X.400,etc.) into an open RFC standard, where other protocols (instant messaging in particular) failed?
Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
(until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
(Am I seeing a pattern here?)
The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
IM has a longer history than you might think. You could send instant messages to people on your network, long before there was anything commercial about it.
IM functions have existed on systems for a very long time. Some of them even had groups and various permissions associated with that. On top of that, there were overall user permissions with varied levels. They could send messages to other people in their same usergroups. An example would be /wallops or /globops, and similar commands. You still see that functionality built into things like IRC servers and some clients. There was also a /msg{user} command. There were also messages sent to the operator on duty, and things like that.
So, this doesn't detract from your overall point. I just figured you should know that IM wasn't created as a business, so much as it was a way to communicate with other people. It would be many years before people sought a profit in it, the monitorization of it was a bit later than that. The first monetization efforts, that I remember, were in selling products (and services) that made it easier on internal networks. For a while, Novell was pretty big in that space, but they weren't the first.
IM has quite a history. Someone should write a book on it.
I'm not sure of the absolute beginnings, but there has probably been IM since they first networked two computers together. It was probably the second thing they wrote and the first message was probably a fart joke.
You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/
It was the one I used the most as it was the first that really permitted me to save every email from 1996 through to around 2007 when I finally migrated all of my email onto Gmail (I'd kept a Windows machine around solely to use The Bat! and decided to go all-in on webmail once Gmail was capable enough).
Simple for PGP, complex filtering, fast search over tens of thousands of emails, fast retrieval, great UI. It was great.
Seeing the picture of that box brought back memories (such as when software came in boxes!)
Every new email client seems to be more interested in re-inventing email that providing a simple straight forward client for "old school" usage.
Currently I use Apples email client, not that I absolutely love it or don't think it could be better, it's just the least no nonsense client currently available.
Thunderbird fails to deliver, for me at least, the same feeling of a well designed powerful application that Firefox does in the browser space.
Because Qualcomm stopped development over a decade ago certain features are problematic these days, certificates updates and the lack of a decent HTML editor for example.
That means that I also have to use Mozilla's Thunderbird for some jobs.
Let me say this categorically: Thunderbird isn't in the race with Eudora. It would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly bad Thunderbird is by comparison. If Thunderbird or any other open source client is ever to catch up with Eudora then a huge amount of work will need to be done.
There is one thing I've never understood about classic well designed software and that is why are supposed clones such as Thunderbird so inferior to the original. One would think Thunderbird's designers would simply copy the Eudora paradigm and correct its out of date features on the way.
Well it's not so with Thunderbird. Perhaps someone knows the reason why.
Anyway, Eudora is on my machine to stay for the time being. It'll be there until the POP/IMAP protocol ceases to work!
I would read that :)
What would I call the best? Try not to laugh, but I liked Outlook Express. OE is one of the few applications I miss from the Windows ecosystem.
I also liked The Bat and the client that came with Opera. I have grown fond of Thunderbird, but I'd not call it the best.
Anyhow, backup and restoration was both possible and pretty easy:
https://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/librarywebsecure/be...
While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.
(For a number of years, I was awarded the Microsoft MVP in Shell/User, IE/OE, and Security categories. The latter only awarded twice as I stopped helping and went back to Linux, sort of returning to my roots which were in Unix.)
Of course I did, how do you think I found them? :-) BTW, I talked to support on the phone about this, they told me that backup/restore was not supported by OE and I was on my own with it.
> While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.
Oh, I eventually did figure out how to back it up and restore it. My point is this is something the application itself should be able to do. It's a fundamental thing it should do.
As for the proprietary binary format, it turns out that Thunderbird said it could import it. I breathed a sigh of relief when it did so successfully. I should not have to rely on 3rd party tools to backup/restore/decode critical data for my business.
With TB there was no longer any reason to put up with that.
BTW, I have files going back 40 years, and email archives going back 25 years. The machines and programs that worked with those files are long gone. I prefer to store things as text files for long term storage, as much as possible, or at least the most common file formats like jpg.
Storing in a binary, proprietary format just isn't acceptable.
P.S. I used a bunch of file compressors back in the DOS days, and before DOS died I uncompressed all of those archives and stored the uncompressed files.
P.P.S. Thanks for taking the time to write out the tips, I hope there are others this can help.
Not mentioned in the article is that Eudora was a multi-window program, modelled after the Macintosh (spatial) Finder, making it easy to see and manage multiple mail folders (typically filter-generated, for mailing lists or important contacts) and messages together. Seemingly every other client imitates Outlook's single peephole view.
* https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/configure-postfix-to-use...
Yeah, Gmail's threading is OK most of the time but try managing a thread where you email a group and get a mix of direct responses and reply-all responses. I inevitably end up missing an important response every time, and it's a real pain in the ass to go back and find one particular response.
My #1 dislike with TB is there is no backup/restore method. There is export/import for the address book, but not for the entire database. Instead it stores things in randomly named directories - madness.
Personally I've come to the conclusion that the worst thing we ever did was to allow HTML to become common place in email. That, and top posting.
I see no immediate solution to the HTML problem. The fact is that producing a good HTML editor turns out to be extremely difficult, so invariably the implementations in email clients are generally only poor subsets of the spec, moreover, no two HTML editors produce anything like similar code/output for any given tag, etc.
"Power user" would be the last term I'd use to describe Eudora users in the mid-2000s at the university where I did tech support. They were generally emeritus professors who had to be instructed whether each click was a left-click or a right-click.
Supporting Eudora was such an absolute nightmare that we had a help desk party when official campus support was terminated. It was an unstable, opaque mess of an email client compared to its 21st century contemporaries.
Hey! Some of us are still using Sylpheed! :)
When you had new mail, a dialog popped up with a picture of a rooster holding a letter in its beak. If you checked your mail and didn't have any, the dialog would show a picture of a snake. After searching the internet for screenshots of these for years, I finally found them! http://old.accesscom.com/support/macintosh/mac-eudora2.html