The first release candidate for Eudora OSE (“Open Source Edition”) has been released , after a gap of several months since the last beta.

Described as “an email client that combines Mozilla’s Thunderbird with code, features, and GUI elements from Qualcomm’s Eudora”, Eudora OSE is the end result of Qualcomm’s decision in October 2006 (Remember that?) to get out of the email market and to open source the code for its email client, once the most popular email app on the Mac platform.

Firing it up for a quick look-see is very nostalgic. First the freestanding mailbox pane appears, and then that unforgettable “bob-bob-a-bob-a-bob” sound of new mail arriving.

Old hands might still cherish a secret flame for Eudora, and find this release an interesting thing to play around with.

It’s not the old Eudora, that’s for sure; feels more like a skinned version of Thunderbird to me.

Apple Mail’s popularity is on the rise. Its market share increased by 21% in 2009, from 7.64% to 9.69%, according to the latest survey by email marketing company CampaignMonitor.

Over the same period, the iPhone and iPod touch captured 8.69% of the market.

One caveat: the results of the survey are based on email image displays. As the company notes, this can skew results in favour of clients that display images by default (like Outlook 2000 and the iPhone) and penalise clients that block images by default (like Outlook 2007 and Gmail).

Nonetheless, the survey’s findings are striking.

The Outlook juggernaut continues to lead the pack, although its share fell by 2.78% in 2009.

Gmail, so central to the email experience of techno-pundits, only accounts for 5.74% of the market overall.

1.31% of users still crank up Lotus Notes to read their emails. Who knew?

CampaignMonitor helpfully summarises the main winners and losers:

But how many people open how much of their email how often on their smart phones rather than on a laptop or desktop? Apart from the iPhone’s glowing performance, the survey doesn’t say.

The survey presents a snapshot of the market in January 2010, and is based on a sample size of more than half-a-billion image displays. mail.app, apple mail, email, gmail, iphone, apple, microsoft outlook, lotus notes

A recent report by British company UK Online Management reveals that occasional reports about the imminent death of email are much exaggerated.

As one might expect, the data in the report (collected and processed by Nielson) shows a 65 percent increase since 2007 in the average amount of time each participant spent online.

Social networking and blogs were the fastest-growing sector. Almost a quarter of all online time was spent on these as the pie chart below, which represents the average online hour, makes clear:

On average participants spent 13.5 minutes out of every hour on blogs and social networks.

Instant messaging, regarded by some (like Business Week) as the “email of the future”, was the biggest casualty. Three years ago it accounted for 14 percent of internet time, now it is only 5 percent.

Email, on the other hand, is rising. As the UKOM press release puts it:

In contrast, personal Email, which many predicted to be another casualty of the social networking phenomenon, has actually increased its share of online time from 6.5 percent to 7.2 percent – a relative rise of 11 percent. In absolute terms, Britons now spend 88 percent more time on Email sites than they did three years ago but 42 percent less time Instant Messaging

The full press release can be downloaded from the UKOM web site.

A video clip on the BBC web site explains the significance of the findings in more depth.

[The survey is based on data collected from at least 35,000 people -- 31,000 of them at home and 4,000 at work.] email, not apple mail, not mail.app, web 2.0, social networking

Ruben Bakker, the developer of Mailplane (a very clever app that “brings Gmail to your Desktop”) has responded to customer requests by raising the number of Macs on which you can use the app with a single licence.

In a post on the Mailplane Google Group he explains:

Until recently, a Mailplane single user license was limited to two Macs. Because many users needed Mailplane on more Macs, I’ve decided to lift this limitation:

• Single-user license: *Install on all Macs you personally use.* Use it at home, school, work: just anywhere. *Limitation:* Make sure you’re the only user. Please do not share your license with anyone else.
• Family license: Allow up to five (5) family members *living in the same household* to use Mailplane on their Macs. As with the single user license, there is no machine limitation for any of the five users.
• Site license: For a number of users working at the same organization. Again, each user may use it anywhere.

As a result individuals will pay only USD 24.95 to use it on as many Macs as they own. The family licence costs USD 39.95. For a site licence covering 20 users or more, the price per licence drops to USD 17.95.

Mailplane is not just a slick way into Gmail’s web interface. It adds additional features like “drag and drop” attachments, the ability to integrate multiple Gmail accounts, enabling new mail notifications, sending screenshots and integration with the productivity app OmniFocus through a bespoke plugin.

If you are tempted to be unfaithful to mail.app and start an affair in the Cloud with Gmail (as I am from time to time), Mailplane is a very good investment.

It was good value for money before. Now, for people with more than two macs (like me), it is even better.gmail, not apple mail, not mail.app, mailplane, the cloud, email

Adam Engst, the editor of TidBITS, has written a thoughtful piece, summarising the many reasons why email still rules the roost.

Along the way, he considers what to make of the current “email is dead” meme, how to assess objectively the impact of the facebook phenomenon, why Gen Z (or whatever we are up to) still needs its email addresses, the innovative nature of Gmail’s design and also hazards a guess at what Google Wave might mean.

It’s worth reading. Check it out at TidBITS: “Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications” email, social networking, facebook, google wave, gmail, internet

Msgpush.com is a new web service that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 software to offer instant alerts on the iPhone when email arrives in your inbox.

When the iPhone was first released, there was a lot of hype about it offering true push email on the go for users. Everyone hoped that this would be provided through the IMAP IDLE extension, which would have made the feature available to all IMAP email services that support IMAP IDLE.

In fact, it turned out that this service was available first of all only to Yahoo.com mail users, and then later in the iPhone 2.0 software to Exchange users, and it doesn’t use IMAP IDLE.

The best my iPhone can do is poll my IMAP accounts through its “Fetch” feature every fifteen minutes.

Hoping to overcome this limitation, msgpush.com offers iPhone users the option to receive faster notification of new email by providing each user with a “fake Exchange account”.

Here’s how it works: You sign up at msgpush.com. It monitors your IMAP account through IMAP IDLE, and then sends notification of new mail to your iPhone through the Exchange protocol. Sounds clever, but there are some caveats:

1. You need to surrender your username and password for the IMAP account to msgpush.com, which not everyone will feel comfortable about.
2. You need to set up a new Exchange account on the iPhone to receive these notifications. But Exchange only allows you to run one profile at a time. So, if you have one configured already (as I do for my Zimbra account at work), this service is a non-starter.
3. It doesn’t actually read or push the email itself, only a notification that the email is waiting in your account’s inbox. So you still need to retrieve the email manually.
4. It’s still in beta and, according to some users, is proving a little erratic.

Still, even with these quibbles, it may be the solution that some users who can’t wait fifteen minutes are looking for.

I haven’t tested it (see 2. above), but you might like to. Sign up at the msgpush.com web site.

[With thanks to the Fastmail blog and forum posters ]

UPDATE: Tom Yager writes more on push email and the iPhone 3.0 software at InfoWorld. imap, imap idle, exchange, iphone, pushmail, notifications,

Microsoft has confirmed that its premier email client, Outlook, will remain non-compliant with web standards in the next version of MS Office due out in 2010.

The statement comes in response to a campaign launched by the Email Standards Project , asking Microsoft to provide Outlook with text rendering that complies with web standards (like almost every other major email client on the market — see a list of them ), and to reverse the decision made in Office 2007 to use Word’s text engine rather than an HTML-compliant editor to compose emails.

MS Word does not provide support for key elements of CSS design tags like float, margin, padding, background-image and many more. You can quickly get a sense of the problem by looking at this image of an email displayed by Outlook 2000 and 2007:

In a post on the Outlook Team Blog , the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Office Communications and Forms Team William Kennedy says that,

…while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.

Of course, a lack of web standards is not the only problem Outlook causes for Mail.app users, perhaps not even the main one.

The Campaign to fix Outlook is not giving up. You can read more about it on its web site or, if you twitter, make your compliant known that way.mail.app, apple mail, web standards, html, outlook, microsoft, office