Mail.com and Eudora, Have you every heard of it?

I’m using Mail.com for many years. (At least 10 years.) I have used it since it's free service until they started to charge for money. That’s fine, I'm willing to pay for it just because I like an e-mail that I already have with them.  I also like to have my mail at home. So, I pay them for POP/SMTP service.

Everything was great with their service until about 5 years ago, I realized that all of their web services are in plain text. (Webmail, POP, SMTP)  It's pretty easy for anyone to monitoring the traffic and get my e-mail account. (That means, they can see your username, password and any e-mail content that you send to someone.)

At that time, I decided to ask them if they had any service that is more secure? For me, I prefer secure POP/SMTP. They replied me that they will look into it. A couple years later when it was the time to renew their service. (I paid them once in a couple years.)  I e-mail them again to ask the same question. They said they are working on it. Well, I just let them have sometime to work on it. Until today, Mail.com still has no SSL/TLS or any kind of secure mail to protect their users that they collect money from. All of their services are in plain text. (POP/SMTP, Webmail) The only thing they do is to give us more e-mail storage. Oh… they do have AJAX capability which is in Beta stage for forever.

With today mail service like Gmail. Gmail already provides secure POP/SMTP for free for quite a while. I really don't understand what Mail.com are doing.  They get my money only because my e-mail is the one that I really don't want to change it. If that's not a case, I'm pretty sure they won't get my money at all. This is the only paid mail service that I pay for many years but it's the one that is the most insecure service.

From my experience, Mail.com is very similar to Eudora. Eudora is a great e-mail program. I’ve used it for a long time and I really like it. Until now, I’m still using it. But the only problem I found many years ago is that it lacks of multi-languages capability.  I remember that at that time, they had an upgraded version of Eudora and I’ve upgraded to a new one. Then, all of my other languages e-mail went unreadable. I e-mail them to ask and the answer I got was… if the older version worked, just went back to the older version. Well, That was what I think everybody knows. But… the reason I ask/told them was to let them know so that they can check what they did that made their multi-languages capability went bad. I would think, at that time, they really didn’t care customers that need to use multi-languages.

Well… until now, I’m waiting for them to release Eudora 8 that is based on Thunderbird. Yes, it’s Penelope Project. I think it’s already 6 months for Beta 3. Many people think the project is dead but I just read their forum and there was a guy said that it’s in progress. They may wait for Thunderbird 3 release before they release Eudora 8. However, there is no official announcement from Eudora team. They are all gone since Beta 3.

Actually, for now, I really don’t wait for Eudora 8 anymore. What I really need is the way to convert all of my Eudora mails into Thunderbird so that I can keep my old mails that were in Eudora mail boxes but I can also use multi-languages. I still like the way Eudora works with attachments and many others features. However, multi-languages is a feature that I really need it nowadays. English is not an only language nowadays.

Update : Eudora 8 Beta 4 (Penelope Extension 0.5a1) is release on Nov 4, 2008