I’ve pretty much given up on MailForge (formerly Odysseus), despite having bought a license in advance. The feature set is meager. The developers don’t apparently understand why people used Eudora. And at the rate they’re going, it’ll be 2014 by the time they get MailForge anywhere near where I need it. And it’s buggy besides.

In other news, although I’ve been searching for a Eudora replacement for five years, the search accelerated after Qualcomm severed ties and intensified after Leopard was released and Eudora started crashing in every session lasting longer than 3 hours. Snow Leopard surprised me. Eudora can run for days and days without crashing in Snow Leopard. I wasn’t even hoping for that. I still want to replace Eudora — after all, it’s unsupported. But at least I’m not corrupting data in my mailstore while the search goes on.

As a capper, Microsoft is talking about upgrading Entourage to be more of an Outlook for the Mac, and that sounds interesting too.

I spent a few hours earlier today reading through IDS’s Odysseus forums learning as much as I could about the company’s development plans. I came away very excited about IDS’s plans, design concepts, and goals. What I like best, in fact, is that while the plan is to start with a subset of Eudora features in the first release, the developers clearly know and love Eudora. Also, though, they’re not afraid to make changes. Eudora has been a hurting unit for several years — especially on the Mac platform, where some of the thinking has been quirky at best. The Windows version surpassed the Mac version quite a while ago and is more up to date. But Eudora in general is best thought of in 2001 terms. Some fresh thinking is definitely a good thing.

So, longtime Eudora owners (and I’m one) may be a little unnerved by IDS’s decision-in-process to make a break from Eudora’s Unix Mbox mailbox structure in favor of a SQL-based approach. But I wholeheartedly applaud this move. The process I went through to convert my Eudora for Windows mailboxes to Eudora for Mac mailboxes (you can’t get there from here) showed me just how painfully antiquated Eudora’s mail store is. I’ve also long had mailbox reliability issues (worse on the Mac) that I just don’t have with other email packages.

In this thread about the possible change to SQL, IDS’s Matt Milano assures forums denizens that the functionality of the mail store will be the same. Messages will be stored in separate mailboxes as they are now, mailboxes will be portable as they are now, and you’ll even be able to edit mailbox contents with an IDS-supplied tool for this purpose. And yes, attachments will still be stored in a separate folder. There are many advantages to the new database structure, but one of the best is the ability to access the mail store on one machine from another machine via the network — something I wrote about as a wish-list item for Eudora several years ago.

Another advantage of the SQL database approach is that IDS will be able to make Odysseus a true multiplatform product that works the same no matter what OS you’re using. Creating the product that way will make it much easier for IDS to upgrade the product and support three platforms simultaneously, the way Firefox and other products are produced.

IDS is planning a Mac UI variant that will look and act a bit more like Apple Mail (while retaining Eudora’s power). Hopefully it will also integrate with the Mac’s environment a little better. There’s a need for this in the Mac world, where Apple has spent a lot of time creating a gestalt among its products, such as iCal, iTunes, Apple Mail, iPhoto, .Mac, Address Book, iPhone, and other pieces. The level of integration creates a powerful advantage for Mac users. But it would be great to see third-party developers plugging into that environment.

From the start, I’ve had serious misgivings about the marriage of Thunderbird and Eudora, which have very, very different design goals. And the development process for Penelope is moving at a glacial pace. It hasn’t even reached version 0.1. The last Penelope update announcement dates back to August.

Contrasting that is IDS’s aggressive roadmap for Odysseus development. The Eudora successor was announced in September, and its makers expect to have their first working beta by the end of December and to ship the product by March 15.

I’m impressed by the orientation, decision-making, professionalism, honestly, and commitment that I sense from the IDS people posting in the forums. And the experience of spending time there has changed my future plans about trying to hold my nose and dip into Apple Mail, which is definitely lacking in the substance I’ve grown accustomed to. (I’m still thinking about making the switch from at least one main account to mail.app, though.)

I’m going to hold out now for Odysseus.

Thanks to Scot’s Newsletter reader George Palfi for alerting me to the existence of Odysseus.

Meanwhile, the company that bought MyRealBox, Messaging Architects, apparently did send out messages warning its customers that it was requiring them to respond or lose their accounts. Several SFNL readers sent me copies of the messages. I don’t know why I didn’t get mine. Apparently, though, the company used the BCC (blind carbon copy) approach to sending out what must have been hundreds of thousands of messages. It doesn’t surprise me, really, that they didn’t reach me. I was getting tired of MyRealBox’s frequent outages anyway.

In case you missed last month’s newsletter, here are the stories I’m talking about.

After years of reliable service, my three MyRealBox accounts went dead without warning a couple of months ago. And there’s no way to get them back. I used one of those accounts as my primary subscription account for hundreds of newsletters and websites. The inconvenience is huge. I don’t even have a list of every site I registered to with my MyRealBox account. And worse, I advised SFNL readers several years ago to grab a MyRealBox account — and I know many did.

I’m piecing together what might have happened, based mostly on a terse message box that appeared on the MyRealBox home page a couple of months ago. I saw the box for the first time when I visited the site after my accounts were closed. The message noted that the time was up for notifying MyRealBox that you wanted to continue your account. All of my messages to customer service to find out about this went completely unanswered. Apparently, Messaging Architects posted a message on its home page warning MyRealBox account holders to contact the company in some fashion or have their accounts revoked by such and such a date. As a POP3/SMTP user of MyRealBox, though, I never had a reason to visit the company website. Messaging Architects apparently didn’t even bother to send an email to its users — or if it did, the message was so spammy it never showed up.

Look, I can understand that the service was free and that nothing free lasts forever. But Messaging Architects might have at least given non-Web-mail users a fighting chance. Even 30-days’ notice with no option of keeping your account would have been more reasonable.

Add Messaging Architects to the Hall of Shame. It belongs there permanently, with no opportunity of parole.

Numerous email messages to Modomail’s customer service went unanswered. Eventually, I gave up on the account entirely. There was nothing I could do.

Once the contract period expired, the account was deleted and I was able to create a new 30-day free account with the same email address and the same login and password information. That account worked just fine (though I let it expire). My other Modomail account will expire at the end of the month.

Good riddance, Modomail.

I’ve moved back to email host FastMail.fm for several inexpensive, low-annual-fee POP3/SMTP accounts.