Making Eudora work for you

There are a few things that will make your life a lot easier when working with Eudora and IMAP. While they require a little bit of initial configuration effort, they will save you lots of trouble later, and they unleash the full power of IMAP.

Customizing your toolbar

This important topic has been omitted in the documentation available elsewhere, but if you use IMAP, it will make your life a lot easier. Eudora does not really delete messages in your remote mailboxes, it just marks them for deletion. To actually remove them, you can select "Remove Deleted Messages" from the Message menu, but that is tedious. We will use a toolbar button instead:
toolbar popup menuBesides the buttons Eudora displays in the toolbar at the top, the program has a wealth of other buttons at your disposal. Right-click on the toolbar, and choose Customize from the popup menu. You get a tabbed dialogue, where only the General tab is really interesting:
customizing toolbar dialogue
button categoriesSelect the Message category on the left, then the Purge button purge deleted messages on the right.
Eudora message buttons
A description of the button's function is displayed:
describe purge button
Drag the button onto the toolbar, at the desired location. If you wish to create a separator, just drag the button a little bit further to the right.
Similarly, you may want to use the buttons for making open filter dialogue and applying Apply manual filters filters (they are in the Tools and Special categories, respectively). Below an example of a fully customized toolbar:
Customized Eudora 4 toolbar

When you delete messages in remote IMAP mailboxes, the messages are marked for deletion with a red X in the server-status column. Once you are ready to clean up your mailbox and throw these messages away, simply click the Purge button that you just put on the toolbar. It will only act on the currently open mailbox (the topmost window).

Moving Outgoing Mail to the Server

IMAP's main advantage is the accessibility of your mail from any location, any machine, using any of various email programs. But when you compose mail with Eudora, this mail is written locally on your computer, not on the server. When you then send it, the protocol used is SMTP, which means no connection to your IMAP server is made. So Eudora stores its outgoing messages in the Out mailbox, just as it did with POP. How does one get it to the server, e.g. into a mailbox called sent-mail (that is the name used by pine for its outgoing messages, so you might want to keep using that). Well, if there is no such mailbox yet on the server, create it by right-clicking the <Dominant> binder and chosing New. Then we will create a filter that moves all our outgoing mail to the server (if you have too much hard disk space, you could also chose to copy instead of moving):

From the Tools menu, choose Filters. Click on the New button at bottom left to create a new filter. On the right, check only the option Outgoing. As we want all mail filtered, and we might be using several personalities, the filter criterion should be as general as possible, so choose the header From: in the drop-down menu and type uic.edu into the text field for the string to be contained in that header. No second filter criterion is needed, so we leave the Boolean selector at ignore.

Now we will choose the actions to be performed on all those messages. In the drop-down menu for the first action, choose Transfer To. Click on the button that appears to its right, and select the sent-mail mailbox for the <Dominant> personality:

Make sure to choose Skip Rest as the second action, unless you wish to apply other filters on the messages afterwards.

To finally create the filter, you need to click the little close box at the top right of this dialogue. You will be prompted whether you wish to save your changes. Click Yes.

Eudora's filters are a very powerful way of organizing your mail, as they can sort messages into mailboxes according to subject, sender, recipients, etc.  They can also set color labels, change the messages' priority, or mark them as read. Even automatically opening the message is possible. If you use filters to sort your incoming mail, you may want to do that with outgoing messages as well. In that case, do not include the action Skip Rest, or transfer the messages to the INBOX instead of the mailbox sent-mail.