Why I Love Computers
Yesterday one of my favorite computer programs stopped working for no apparent reason. I've used Eudora as my email client for as long as I can remember. Probably 10 years, likely more. I've never had any problem with it either at home or at work. It gets mail. It sends mail. Eudora isn't flashy. It does exactly what it needs to without doing anything superfluous.
I love it. It's just like me.
But for reasons still unclear to me, Eudora on my work PC decided it would no longer send messages. It would retrieve them, it would queue them, but it wouldn't send them. Eudora kept giving me a "550 Authentication Required" error whenever I hit the "send" button. I don't know if it was my ISP or me that changed, but sending email from work was dead in the water.
I did the usual computer repairman thing. I tried this; I tried that; poked this; poked that, blindly hoping some random change would fix things. Nothing worked. I went as far as installing Thunderbird, which worked fine, just to prove an email client still worked for me.
Late today, after what I figured to be a few, final, probably futile, rounds of Googling help for Eudora, a forum on some obscure website suggested I add this one statement to my eudora.ini file that I did not need before:
SMTPAuthBanished=CRAM-MD5
I didn't know what it meant. I was grasping at straws. I cut. I pasted. I saved. I hit send.
Badda-boom, badda-bing, all my queued email went sailing on its way, all of them, maybe a hundred, each titled something like "Test", "Another Test", "Yet Another Test", "Still Yet Another Test", "Still Yet One More Test", and "This is Absolutely the Last Test." Changing that one setting caused Eudora to spew forth test email like projectile vomit to everyone I knew. You'll probably get one.
No need to reply.
K-
I love it. It's just like me.
But for reasons still unclear to me, Eudora on my work PC decided it would no longer send messages. It would retrieve them, it would queue them, but it wouldn't send them. Eudora kept giving me a "550 Authentication Required" error whenever I hit the "send" button. I don't know if it was my ISP or me that changed, but sending email from work was dead in the water.
I did the usual computer repairman thing. I tried this; I tried that; poked this; poked that, blindly hoping some random change would fix things. Nothing worked. I went as far as installing Thunderbird, which worked fine, just to prove an email client still worked for me.
Late today, after what I figured to be a few, final, probably futile, rounds of Googling help for Eudora, a forum on some obscure website suggested I add this one statement to my eudora.ini file that I did not need before:
SMTPAuthBanished=CRAM-MD5
I didn't know what it meant. I was grasping at straws. I cut. I pasted. I saved. I hit send.
Badda-boom, badda-bing, all my queued email went sailing on its way, all of them, maybe a hundred, each titled something like "Test", "Another Test", "Yet Another Test", "Still Yet Another Test", "Still Yet One More Test", and "This is Absolutely the Last Test." Changing that one setting caused Eudora to spew forth test email like projectile vomit to everyone I knew. You'll probably get one.
No need to reply.
K-
I've been using Eudora at home and work for probably 8 years. Whenever I get a message from Eudora, it is almost always an ISP issue.
Eudora is an old favorite, though circumstance has led me to the not entirely unsatisfactory Thunderbird. Your account sure sounded familiar though. Reminded me of when my email service provider changed the port for outgoing mail without prior notice. I went through the same process you did -- "what the heck are people online saying about this" -- and found the answer pretty quickly.
I don't know if it's the ISP or not, Rob. I have the same Eudora version installed at work and at home. The installation at home still works. It's only the work installation that needed its INI file modified.
Thunderbird seemed much the same as Eudora but in the little bit I used it didn't see enough reason to switch.
K-