Re: Plain Text Email

[Si Wright xywrite4@xxxxxxxx]

Patricia M. Godfrey asked:

> especially internet-related things
> Isn't there ANY email app that will just deal
> in plain text files, and let the enduser decide where he or she
> wants to store them, and copy and paste between?

Eudora is now abandonware-open source-freeware. Qualcomm very 
honorably gave it up and handed it over to Mozilla. The 7.x 
version, available from http://www.eudora.com/download/ ,  
is a very solid, sensible email program--legibly laid out, 
very searchable, many user options.  Perhaps the Mozilla 
folks will use it to improve T-bird.

Eudora stores its mailboxes in its own filetype : In.mbx, 
Out.mbx, etc. There's also in.toc et al. to index them.  
The mbx files grow gigantic unless you keep creating new 
mailboxes. However, the .mbx files CAN be opened with a 
plain-text editor, with all the attendant cut-and-pasting 
possibilities. And you can choose where they are stored.

When plain-text-editing the .mbx files, you do have to be 
careful around the headers. I always copy the .mbx file 
before fooling around with it.  Messing up a header will 
then baffle Eudora about whether everything past the messed-up
header has been read. However, when an email with some kind of 
very bad syntax left Eudora completely deranged--a one-time 
problem that has not recurred--going into In.mbx with a
 plain-text editor let me fix it.

I haven't tried T-Bird, but you might want to give Eudora a spin.

Jon Pareles