a scary transition
I first really started using email regularly when I enrolled as a Master's student at UAF in 1994. Initially I used the email they provided, which was a very simple text-only web based service. This was one of those systems wherein one started typing an email to someone, and if one put in two hard returns (the "enter" key) in a row the message would send straight away, with no second chance to say "wait, I am not done yet".
Since I am one of those people that likes a blank line between paragraphs, and I also typically type more than one paragraph per email, I soon learned to type a couple of spaces on the "blank" line before hitting the enter key to move on to the next paragraph. Also, since that system didn't include such high-tech features like spell-checking, I tended to do my typing in Word and then copy-paste the message into the email itself. Needless to say, the trick of typing spaces in what was otherwise a blank line between paragraphs soon became a habit--any time I forgot and pasted a long letter without the spaces the message would send after the first paragraph, and then I would get a ton of error messages as the computer failed to understand the "commands" in what was actually the rest of the letter.
Another challenge with that system was archiving--I wanted copies of the messages I sent and received to be stored on my own computer, not the university server. I learned how to export the messages as plain text files, and every month or so I did this, but since they all came in a clump actually finding a specific message again was a bit of a challenge.
Needless to say, when I was introduced to the concept of Eudora as a program for doing email I found it quite appealing. 1) it downloaded all of my messages for me--now I could see and read my messages when I wasn't on line, and I could write replies off line, too, and they would line up and be ready to send the next time I had access. 2) it had the possibility to edit the text and offered a spell-checking possibility. 3) it let me set up folders to organize messages I have received and sent. 4) it let me set up filters so that messages sent to email lists would go into their own folders, leaving nothing but mail addressed to me in the inbox.
Therefore I happily started using this program, around 1995. Over the years I have been very, very happy with it. Each time I obtained a new email address I would add it to the pile of addresses it checked for my messages, and there was no need to set up new filters--it already knew where to put messages from each email list I received. I became an email addict, spending hours each day reading my list-mail and replying to my personal mail. My in-box was emptied several times a day--each time I replied to a letter it got filed in the appropriate folder and removed from the in box. For years and years I maintained the always clean and empty in box by replying to things promptly and filing everything I had answered. I deleted messages sent to email lists promptly after reading them, since they were all archived on the list web page there was no need for me to keep a copy.
I started to slow down on my email while doing my PhD--for the first time I got busy enough that I wasn't replying to messages the second I saw them, but instead I was letting them sit till I had time/energy to deal with them later. Instead of an always-empty in-box I became a "clean out the inbox every month or three in one long marathon session of replying and filing messages" kind of person. It was during this time that I got introduced to LJ and FB and other social media options. I was still spending a couple of hours a day *reading* messages sent via email, or posted to LJ, FB, blogs, etc., but I wasn't answering my mail promptly anymore. Fortunately, the amount of mail I had to answer also decreased (partially due to other people shifting from email based to social media based options on their ends, and partially due to my not replying to others meant that they didn't write me again).
But despite my slow down in email, Eduora was still my friend--it has an interface that I was very, very comfortable with, after more than a decade of use, upgrading regularly as it became appropriate, and the filters all did what I wanted them to do. I started hearing others criticize the program as obsolete, and after a time their web page announced that they were abandoning it--there would be no new upgrades or support. But it wasn't broken, so why worry? --it didn't need fixing.
I did have occasional glitches with asking too much of it--somewhere along the way I decided that it would make sense to have two versions of Eudora running on my computer--one for my uni mail, and one for my personal mail. This turned out to be possible, if one has each one installed in a separate folder, and I managed to make it work for a number of years.It certainly did make organizing my uni mail easier--my personal Eudora has hundreds of folders--one for each person with whom I have ever corresponded. These are mostly organized by the SCA Kingdom plus/minus the sub-branch the correspondents live in, since by and large most of my contacts over the years have been in the SCA, and the non-SCA folk were organized by category (e.g. "school", or "folk dance"). Over in the Uni Eudora, on the other hand, people were organized by their universities or which geology email list I met them through.
The next complaint that crept into my Eudora use was special characters. Sadly messages with characters that show up in other languages (such as ä. ö. and å in Swedish) weren't being displayed correctly in Eudora, which made reading messages written in languages other than English a real challenge. I have tried on a number of occasions to find whatever setting it is that causes that issue and fix it, but I have never had any luck with it.
Up until I started my current job I did not have a work computer. Instead I had a personal laptop computer that I bought with my own money (and therefore I tended to let them get up to about 8 years old before replacing them with a new one), and upon which I would install programs needed for work using the university licence. This job, on the other hand, is a real job, with real benefits like an actual work computer. Now, for the first time ever, I have more than once computer I am using regularly.
Sort of. In reality, I am finding that I turn on my personal computer less and less often. lord_kjar and I are busy enough in the evenings and weekends that I often don't turn on my personal computer for several days in a row. Soon after getting the work computer I set up the spreadsheets with my logs for tracking my time, food, and exercise on DropBox, so that I can access them on either computer, which has been working very well for me (so long as I remember to check that DropBox has finished synchronizing the folders before I turn off the computer).
After a month or so of using DropBox for those files I want to access in any location (including lord_kjar's computer and our android tablet, and even my phone) it occurred to me to wonder if it would be possible to move my Eudora to DropBox and access my mail from any of these computers. Therefore we set up a new DropBox account just for Eudora (since there is a 2GB limit for the free DrobBox accounts, and I do have decades worth of messages, and years worth of over-written installations and upgrades in that folder). The answer is that, yes, it does work. However, for the first time ever I started getting occasional error messages complaining about buffering issues in Eudora, and I began to worry about the program crashing and taking my data with it.
I am also having issues with the second DropBox--for reasons we don't understand, after several weeks of working with no issues it now requires that I go through the steps of setting up the account to synchronize every time I restart my computer, which is kind of annoying, but it does mean that I have finally memorized that password. Never mind that I never need to enter the password for the original DropBox account.
These days I have a work phone which comes with internet--this means that I can check my mail on my phone whenever I want. However, on the phone none of my filters in Eudora apply--they only work when the program downloads the messages, at which point I can no longer access them on the phone. In the three months since obtaining this phone I have been looking at messages on the phone, reading and deleting (or sometimes just deleting) the list email as it comes in, replying to urgent messages on the phone if that is where I see them, and leaving the rest to sit till next I open Eudora and download my messages, when I may or may not actually make the time to reply to and file the messages.
These days pretty much all of my email addresses are gmail based. My old sca.org address was killed by SCA.Inc., my UTAS and UMilano addresses have both ceased to function, I haven't used my yahoo or hotmail accounts in years. Therefore, given all of the combined factors, I have decided that, perhaps, it is time to start actually using gmail to organize my mail. I spent an hour this morning setting up labels and filters in gmail to organize the mail that had come in last night whilst I slept, and learned that while I haven't yet found a way to select and delete multiple messages at once on my phone, I can select and then delete all of the messages in, say, the SCA-West folder if I log in to that gmail address on the computer.
Therefore, after filing the tiny bit of personal mail in brand-new folders within gmail itself, and deleting all of my list mail, I then opened Eudora and changed my preferences for every account to "do not check mail". Now I can still use Eudora to access old messages (it is amazing how often people ask me questions which I can answer by looking at old emails), but it won't download anything new unless I ask it to. I will give it a few weeks and see how I go. It will take ages to get folders set up for everyone who writes to me, but as no one does so very often there will, I hope, be time to create each new folder as I need it.
Why is this transition scary? Because I don't always have internet access. When I was in France last week I had wireless access, in theory, both at the meeting and in the hotel, but in practice the connection was iffy at best, and when actually traveling outside of Sweden I have no access at all usually, since I am not willing to pay for data roaming unless something really urgent comes up. Now if I have a question and want to look up messages that have come in since I quit downloading them to Eudora I will actually need to have internet access, and I cannot guarantee that it will always be there when I want it.