In many ways, Eudora does not perform well when it is dealing with very
large mailboxes of many hundred messages. To organize your mail, create
multiple mailboxes, and put related mailboxes together into a folder of
mailboxes. Inside your overall mail folder, these will be easily recognizable
by their .fol extension. You can also create folders of mailboxes
on an IMAP server. To create such a folder, right-click on the "mail"
icon or the name of your IMAP personality in the mailboxes window, and
choose "New". Check the box for making this a folder,
enter a name, then click OK. Eudora will offer to create a new
mailbox inside this folder right away.
It is particularly important to clean out your In and Out
mailboxes regularly, as these are always in memory while Eudora is running.
Start new mailboxes often, but keep your mail in archive mailboxes.
Select multiple messages in the mailbox TOC (table of contents) and drag them
on top of any mailbox at the left to move the messages there. Want to copy instead
of moving? Simply hold down Ctrl or Shift before you
let go of the mouse - a plus-icon indicates that you are copying, not moving.
You can drag all messages at once from one mailbox into another, and you can
drag entire local mailboxes into folders, but you cannot drag an entire IMAP
mailbox to local mail or vice versa.
While reading a message, you can drag it to another mailbox via the tow-truck
icon at top left. You won't see this while you are previewing the message,
only when it is open in its own window.
Drag-and-drop transfers can be disabled in the Tools > Options
> Mailboxes dialog.
There is no drag-and-drop support from the "Find Messages"
dialog - to transfer found messages without opening them, select them,
then right-click and choose "Transfer".
The IMAP protocol allows you to store mail on the mail server, not just locally. You can sort mail into these mailboxes automatically, via filters set up in Eudora or on the server. Mail stored in these mailboxes counts against your file quota, so only store there things you want to access from multiple locations. IMAP Details available online.
Deleting messages from IMAP mailboxes is a two-step process (just as with pine). When you "delete" a message, it will only be marked for deletion. Only when you choose to "Purge Deleted Messages" (in the "Message" menu) will they actually get expunged from the mailbox. To make this less painful, customize your toolbar and put the "Purge Messages" button on it. The alternative option of moving the messages to another mailbox upon deletion is not recommended: it only works with a server-side mailbox, which it will never actually clean for you (you have to go and do it yourself occasionally), plus due to a bug in Eudora 6 you'll get a confusing error message about a missing IMAP "Trash" mailbox when quitting the application.
Eudora will check for new mail in your INBOX only. If you have set up filters to move messages to IMAP mailboxes (be it Eudora filters or server-side filters), Eudora normally won't tell you that new messages have arrived in those until you right-click the mailbox and choose "Resynchronize". With Eudora 6.1, however, you can for select mailboxes choose to automatically resynchronize them on mail check (this option is in the context menu for each IMAP mailbox, which you get by right-clicking it). Do this only for important mailboxes, as it makes the initial mail check much slower.
Sometimes new mailboxes are created on the server (e.g. via WebMail). To tell Eudora about them, right-click the personality name in the mailbox window and choose "Refresh mailbox list".
Each IMAP mailbox is mirrored locally - occasional corruption such as messages listed in duplicate can be cleared by deleting those local copies. They are held inside your mail folder's "IMAP" subfolder, below the personality name. Deleting (with Eudora off!) the entire content of the folder named after the personality, then starting Eudora and checking mail will rebuild the local copies.
Since version 5.2, a fresh installation of Eudora offers to put your
mail into a separate folder inside your Windows home directory (e.g. C:\Documents
and Settings\yourname\Application Data\Eudora\ ), but earlier versions
always stored the mail in the application directory by default. To allow
multiple users to keep separate mail accounts on the same system required
a trick, which is still useful to separate old mail archives from current
mail, or to let someone set up a separate mail folder for testing.
Say, you want to put your mail into folder D:\mail. Create
a shortcut to the Eudora executable on your desktop, then right-click
it and choose Properties. Behind the path to the executable,
leave a space, then type D:\mail (if the path contains spaces,
quote it). When you now launch Eudora from this shortcut, it will store
all mail and associated files inside this self-contained folder. (see
complete
details).
If you set up a separate mail folder as described above, just archive the entire folder (e.g. to CDROM). To move it to another computer is trivial, just create a shortcut as described above to access this mail. To move mail from a PC to a Macintosh or vice versa, a conversion is necessary, for details see the Eudora knowledgebase. If you don't yet have a separate self-contained mail folder, create one today (see details)!
To search for messages containing a specific string, type Ctrl-F.
If you do this while looking at the contents of a specific mailbox, Eudora
will search only in this box, otherwise it will search in all local and
IMAP mailboxes (careful - this can take a long time).
Specify what headers or body to search in - this is crucial for good search
results. Searching just anywhere will also match things like Message-ID
and thus lead to many extraneous matches.
You can specify multiple independent search terms by clicking on the "More"
button — click "Fewer" to get rid of the extra
search criteria again.
You can also search in several mailboxes of your choice by checking them
off on the mailboxes tab.
Search results can be sorted, e.g. by date, by clicking on the column
headings. Click twice to sort in reverse order, here newest first.
To find specific text within the current message, use Ctrl-Shift-F.