Why Eudora?

I prefer Eudora to MSware for email for a number of safety reasons:

Now you can risk manage scripts in MSware, and upgrade Internet Explorer to fix the disasterous MIME-spoofing bug - but you can never stop MSware (and most other email applications) from hiding attachments within the mailboxes, where the cannot be found by Find, deleted, virus scanned or cleaned.

Keeping incoming attachments out of the mailboxes has other advantages too:

• Mailboxes are smaller, faster to compact, less prone to corruption
• Mailboxes are clean, i.e. pose no malware risk to the system
• As mailboxes are small and clean, can be included in data backup
• Attachments can be located outside the data/backup set
• Attachments can be included within a "suspect files" subtree
• This "suspect files" subtree can be targeted by on-demand antivirus

Eudora also makes management of email data a lot easier.  Mailboxes exist as files, and can be renamed and copied between installations directly from Windows Explorer; no special import/export procedures required, and the data works accross all versions of Eudora fropm 3.xx to 5.xx (ever tried going back from Outlook Express 5 to 4?).  Mail folders are simply directories with an .FOL extension, so these can be created and populated directly from Windows Explorer as well.  Finally, you can access multiple mail data sets from a single Eudora installation, by specifying the path to the mail data as a command line parameter within the shortcut to Eudora.

(C) Chris Quirke, all rights reserved - December 2002

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