Why I'm Dumping Eudora After Ten Years

For nearly ten years I've been using Eudora as my email program. I'm by nature loyal to products, until something significantly better comes along, or until they manage to completely piss me off. Eudora has managed to do the latter.

Over the last few months, the quantity of Spam I receive has gone from a few hundred pieces a day to ~4,000. To stay within the quota limits of my mailbox at my ISP, I leave Eudora 6.1.2 running all day, and have filters to delete to Spam off the server in nearly real time.

About ten days ago, Eudora suddenly started barfing on about one message out of a hundred. The usual unhelpful error message was "Could not open file for writing. Cause: No such file or directory exists. (2)". The program would then hang waiting for a keyboard response.

In trying to find a solution, I found suggestions that the attachment directory was full, or that an anti-virus program was the cause. Neither of these proved to be the case. I tried every source I could for an answer, with no success.

I've got to have a reliable mail program. That trumps everything else. So I'm dumping Eudora. Some of the other things I won't miss include (in no particular order):

• Program crashes when drafting long messages
• Filters that can handle only two conditions
• Program crashes when reading large blocks of mail from server
• No "Mark Folder Read" option
• Useless error messages
• No cleanup facility for old or orphaned attachments
• No real multi-tasking
• Program that insist on popping relentlessly to the forefront every time something happens
• Program that force you out of the message you are reading when new mail arrives
• Options and settings that are almost cryptically locate and almost hidden
  

This isn't a troll, and I'm not shilling for another product. FWIW, I've tentatively switched to Thunderbird, The Bat although it has some issues too. If anyone has other suggestions, I'd like to hear them.