Eudora Resources

NOTE: If our web server is slow, it is probably because the host is busy doing the economics number-crunching that my colleagues and I get paid to do (see CFNPP Home Page for details). Please try again during off-peak hours, which is any time other than 8am - 6pm Eastern (US) time, which is 5 hours west of GMT. Thank you.

About Eudora

Eudora by Qualcomm, Inc. is a popular Post Office Protocol (POP3) electronic mail client for MS Windows and the Mac. It is apparent from the messages in the Usenet newsgroup comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows that users have a lot of questions about the software. This web page is an attempt to provide links to some of the many resources that can answer those questions. This web page is not an "official" Eudora or Qualcomm site, and is neither endorsed nor supported by Qualcomm.

Eudora Manuals

Eudora Light Manuals and Viewers

You can just go to the Qualcomm ftp site and poke around for what you want, or you can use the direct links to files below. Note that Qualcomm appears to have cleared all of the old manuals (eg, Eudora Light 1.5.2) off of its ftp site.
You can download the Eudora Light for Windows 3.0.1 manual directly from Qualcomm's ftp site, or by using the link on Qualcomm's Eudora Light page. The manual is in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF) and is 667 KB.
There are several places where you can freely download the Adobe Acrobat viewer. One good place is directly from Adobe. Adobe Acrobat 3.0 can also work as a plug-in for Netscape 2.0 and higher.

Eudora Pro Manual

You should have gotten a Eudora Pro manual when you bought Eudora Pro. Electronic purchases come with a nice manual in Adobe Acrobat format, and those who actually buy a box of diskettes get a hard copy manual. I used to have a link to the Eudora Pro manual available on the Cornell Information Technologies ftp site, but I have discontinued that since learning that the ftpadmin has restricted access to that directory to those connecting from within the cornell.edu domain. I imagine that this was done to comply with the terms of the university's site license with Eudora.
Pete Beim does have a copy of the Eudora Pro 3.0 beta manual in the manuals section of his Eudora web site. The beta manual is not all that different from the final version.
The Eudora 2.2 manual addendum (218 KB) is still available from Qualcomm. It includes all of the changes from version 2.1 to 2.2. It is in Common Ground format, and the viewer is built-in to the file.

Add-on Software to Co mp lement Eud ora

The Add-on Software section has moved to its own page.

More info

More info from Qualcomm

The Eudora home page has additional information about Eudora.
The Eudora FAQ (Frequently Asked/Answered Questions) at Qualcomm's web site remains the official FAQ for Eudora.

Eudora manuals and tutorials on the web

The Guide to the Eudora Mail Program at Staffordshire University in the UK is a "webified" version of the Eudora Manual, with mirror sites in Oregon and Australia.
There is a Eudora Light tutorial hosted at Vanderbilt University.

Other Eudora web pages

Hank Zimmerman's [Unofficial] Eudora Site (formerly Andrew Starr's) is extremely comprehensive with a host of Eudora links, including utilities and plug-ins (mostly for the Mac version) that I haven't seen elsewhere.
Pete Beim's Eudora FAQs & Links page covers a great deal of Eudora material, including lots of basic things for those who just cannot bear to RTFM. He also has links to several other sites with information about Eudora.
Tony Greene's web site has good information on Eudora and on PGP. In particular, Tony has written some utilities to convert Eudora address books to HTML, extract senders' email addresses from saved mail files, and a work-in-progress vCard manager for Eudora. He also has some sensible, easy-to-implment advice for avoiding spam.
There is a very active Eudora listserv at Williams College. The site includes what appears to be a complete archive of postings to the group.
Brian Garrett has compiled a list of Eudora error messages. His page also includes instructions for setting up Eudora for multiple users in Windows and on a Macintosh, plus tips on setting up Eudora to be the mail client for MS Internet Explorer, and info about Eudora and encoding/decoding.

Miscellaneous

I have compiled some of the information that others have reported on the Eudora .toc file structure, including programs to modify the out.toc file or report on status information in .toc files.
I have put together some notes on the Eudora Nickname/Address Book file structure, that may be especially useful to those converting from other address book formats or wishing to create a Eudora Nickname/Address Book file from an existing data base.
Barry T. Drake has written a Perl script called remail (see note) to split up multiple pieces of mail that have been joined together by a combination of Eudora and an incompatible POP server.

Note: It is recommended that you do not copy Perl scripts by cutting and pasting directly from your WWW browser, because certain symbols like < and > mean different things in Perl and HTML. You are better off downloading the file itself or using the View Source option and copying from there. Unless, of course, the author of the script has deliberately modified the script to look OK in HTML, in which case the recommendation would be the other way around. Got that? ;o)

Additional help resources are available in Eudora Pro by checking out the menu entries under Help / More Help, and Help / QUEST News. I suspect there is something comparable under the Eudora Light menus, but don't shoot me if there isn't.

Four more FAQs, with Answers

The More FAQs section now has its own page.

Info for Mac Users

I confess that in preparing this page I have almost completely neglected Eudora on the Mac platform. I have nothing against Macs, I just don't use them very often (anyone care to give me one?). For Mac-specific information, I suggest you visit any of the following resources:

About this site

I started this site in May 1996 because I got tired of seeing the same questions asked and answered repeatedly in the Usenet newsgroup comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows; most of the answers could be found in the Eudora manuals or help file. I realized that I didn't have the time to compile a complete Eudora FAQ, so instead I created this site, which originally consisted almost entirely of links to places to download the Eudora manuals, along with a couple links to other web pages.

I later augmented that content with some tips, FAQs, and other information that was not covered, or not covered in sufficient detail, in the manuals. Much of this is pretty esoteric stuff, like the structure of Eudora's .toc files, the MIME text/enriched format that some versions of Eudora use for special text formatting, and so forth. For the most part, the following rule applies to this site: if you can find it in the Eudora manuals, you probably will not find it at this site. For those basic questions, I direct you to Pete Beim's Eudora Links and FAQs site, or Andrew Starr's Eudora Site, both of which are far more comprehensive than this site.

Have you gotten the hint yet that I encourage people to RTFM (Read The Fine Manual)? I do this mostly because Eudora has so many features, that most people would not even think to seek information about about some of them, even though they prove to be very useful once you discover them.

Finally, readers may note that this page is "Lynx-enhanced". Aside from the usual belief in substance over style, I take seriously the responsibility of making these pages accessible to the widest audience possible, regardless of the browser they use, the speed of their internet connection, and so forth. This includes the visually-impaired, who often "surf the web" using Lynx and text-to-speech converters, or some other method that gets totally baffled by bad HTML, gratuitous use of graphics and tables, and frames, for which there is no widely-accepted standard yet. For those who share that interest, or any web author, I highly recommend the All Things Web site.

NOTE: The Eudora logo at the top of this page, and the names Eudora, Qualcomm, Adobe, Acrobat, Pine, Pegasus, and Windows are all registered trademarks and/or copyrighted by the respective companies. I have no connection with any of these companies other than that I am a satisfied user of their products (although to tell the truth, I'm not all that satisfied with Windows).

This page has had hits since May 22, 1996.
Counter courtesy of George Burgyan