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Eudora 5 Basics

Tutorial:

Eudora 5 is a free program available from places like www.download.com and www.tucows.com. Unlike the old Eudora Light 3.0, this is a full featured e-mail program. You can set it up to check multiple e-mails. You can setup password protected "personalities" so that individual family members can see their own e-mails in privacy. It also has a very functional "address book" for keeping track of the e-mail addresses of friends and family.

This first page will show you the basic layout of Eudora 5. This will include the main window including the inbox for checking your e-mail. This page will also show you how to send an e-mail. This includes attaching files to your e-mails and even putting a picture into an e-mail.

Let's start with the main window pictured below.

This window has a bunch of "menus" at the top: file, edit, mailbox, message, transfer, special, tools, window & help. If you click on the menu then a box will drop down and provide you with a bunch of options. Most of these windows are pictured in a related Web page. You can click on the "menus" quick link at the top of this page to see the wide variety of options that you have with the Eudora windows.

Below the menus are a bunch of buttons. We will cover those later in this same page. <click here to skip to the buttons section> Below the buttons to the left is a mini-window that is pictured below. Let's focus on that window for a minute.

Inbox & Outbox:

You will usually be able to see your folders box to the left. It looks like the one pictured below. If you can't see that box then click the "tools" menu and choose mailboxes and then the following window will pop-up. You can also go directly to your inbox by clicking the clicking the "mailbox" menu at the top and choosing the "in" option.

There are some little tabs at the bottom of this window. The two main tabs are the folders tab and the "personalities" tab. Click on the folders tab and you will see your inbox, outbox & trash. You can also add additional folders such as work, school, family and friends so that you can sort your e-mails between different folders.

If you double-click on a folder then it will pop-up in a separate window in the big frame to the right. If you look at the first picture in this tutorial, you will see that I had both the inbox and the outbox open. Each of those folders had one e-mail in them when I took the picture. The e-mails are arranged in a list. If you click on one then you can see the contents of the e-mail.

The personalities tab is where you can see the different profiles that you might setup on your computer. For example, you can have a profile for each e-mail address that you have if you have more than one e-mail address. Just setup a persona for each identity. You can also have separate personalities for Mom, Dad, Junior, Sis and the rest of your family. These personalities can be password protected so that Junior and Sis don't argue over reading each other's private e-mails.

Personalities and password issues are covered in more detail in the "multiple accounts & privacy" Web page that you can access by clicking on that quick link at the top of this page. Let's learn how to send an e-mail message to a friend with Eudora 5.

Sending E-Mails:

There are several ways to send a new e-mail to a friend or any other person that has given you their e-mail address. You can click on the "message" menu at the top of the main window and choose the "new message" option. You can also click on the "new message" button that looks like this:

Either route will pop-up a new message that will look like this:

Don't worry about the many buttons and options at first. Let's learn the basics. Once you've learned the basics, you can experiment with the buttons. (Tip: Hold your mouse pointer over any button for a few seconds and a little tiny window will pop-up to tell you what that button does.)

Type in the full e-mail address to the right of the "To:" section. For example, the picture above has the following address plugged-in to that box: myfriend@anotherisp.com.

The "From:" box below that will put in your default e-mail identity. If you have multiple e-mail accounts setup on Eudora then click the little arrow to the left of the "From:" box to choose a different e-mail identity. (Tip: Many people have separate e-mail accounts for work and family. You can easily setup "personalities" to register each different e-mail account.)

Note: If you haven't setup your identity then you need to either go to the "E-Mail Setup Wizard" or the "Manual Setup" page to setup your Eudora 5 with your ISP and e-mail information. Use the quick links at the top or bottom of the page to do this.

The "subject:" box is where you can put a short description of the message. Don't make this subject too long. When people receive your e-mail, they will also see the subject line. For example, it might say something like "Happy Birthday!"

After you've finished putting in a subject line, you've got some advanced options. You can put addresses into the "cc:" box and those people will receive "carbon copies" of the e-mail message. The main recipient will know that they got copies. In the "bcc:" box, you can send "blind copies." This means that only you and the "blind copy" recipient will know that they received a copy. The regular recipient and the "cc:" people won't know any of the "bcc:" people received a copy of the e-mail.

The "attached" box will tell you if you've got any text files, pictures, etc., attached to the e-mail. You can literally drag-and-drop a file from your desktop or a folder in your c: drive into that box to attach Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and just about any other computer document so that a copy of the file is attached to your e-mail. You can also click the message menu and choose "attach file" (or possibly "send file" if you don't have a new message open) as pictured below.

The bottom box is where you type your message. (See the picture where it says "type in your message here" if you aren't sure which box to use.) You can also click the tiny button in the top right corner to plug a picture into your e-mail message. (See the picture where it says "picture" highlighted in blue.) If you can't find that button then click the edit menu and choose the insert -> picture option.

Once you've got the message typed into the box, click the "send" button in the top right corner to send the message. You can also click the message menu and choose the "send immediately" option (grayed out in the picture above) to send the message.

Buttons:

There are a bunch of buttons at the top of the Eudora 5 window. They are handy shortcuts for doing things like "forwarding" an e-mail or going to your address book. You can tell what a button does by holding your mouse pointer over the button for a few seconds. A little message will pop-up that tells you what the button does. For example, the following picture has a little text message that says "new message" because I was holding my pointer over the new message button when I took that picture. We'll cover the main buttons below.

This is the trash can button that lets you delete old e-mails that you don't want to waste precious hard drive space. Just highlight a message by clicking on it in the inbox (or wherever the message is located). Click the trash icon after you've highlighted the e-mail and your computer will delete that file.

Click this button to tell Eudora to go check for new e-mails that might be waiting for you on your ISP's mail center computers.

Click this button to start a new e-mail message that you want to send out.

Click this button to forward a message that you've received to someone else.

Click this button to send a reply to the person who sent you the open or highlighted e-mail message. The reply will automatically have the address for the person who sent you the message. It will include the original message plus you can type in your response to the message.

This is the "reply to all" button. If multiple people received the e-mail then you can click this button to send a reply to everyone that got the original message as well as the person that sent the message. Use the button above this one if you only want to reply to the person that sent the message.

Click this button to attach a file to an e-mail that you are sending to someone. You can attach documents, pictures, databases and just about any other computer file. Just be careful not to attach something really big. Attachments over 1 MB (or even less) travel very slowly across the internet. Your computer and your connection may not be able to handle a big attachment.

Click this button to find an e-mail that is buried away in Eudora. You can search by a bunch of different criteria such as date, e-mail identities, subject lines, etc.

Click this link to get to your address book where you can store e-mail addresses for future use. The address book is covered in more detail in another Web page that you can access from the links at the top or bottom of this page.

Click this button to print an e-mail. Don't forget to make sure that the e-mail is either open or highlighted so that your computer knows which e-mail to print.

Click this button to get more help with the many functions of Eudora 5.

This concludes the basics of using Eudora. There is still a lot more to learn. Click on one of the following links to get to other topics.