Labs

Eudora comes in several versions, all of which start from the same installer program. The basic Light mode is a very stripped-down email client. The Paid version costs $52 (around £30) to register, and includes a suite of spam-fighting tools; BossWatch, a feature that alerts you to prevent accidental replies to particular recipients who require tact, such as managers or clients; and full technical support.

Sponsored mode sits between the two. It lacks BossWatch and includes no spam blocker or technical support, but provides all the other features of Paid mode in return for displaying small adverts in its interface. The ads are unobtrusive, and don't affect connection speed - Eudora proved one of the fastest programs at downloading mail from our POP3 accounts.

The software enables you to import existing accounts directly from Outlook and Outlook Express (along with address books), or supply details manually for each email 'Personality', the quaint term Eudora uses for email accounts. Sadly, our webmail settings didn't transfer as smoothly as we'd have liked. Gmail uses different ports from the POP3 accounts provided by ISPs, so we had to edit this information manually in Eudora, which is not as straightforward as it could be.

Eudora is extremely quick to download messages. The process can be made even quicker by using a built-in filter that ignores emails on the basis of size, which is a useful

When our mail was imported, a few things jumped out at us. The first was that Eudora provides no immediate indicator of how many messages are in your inbox. The second is that every single message arrived in our inbox. Basic filtering can be achieved by creating mail rules to apply to incoming messages, but creating these is up to you. If you want intelligent spam-busting facilities, you'll have to pay $52 for the privilege.

On the plus side, Eudora indexes the content of email messages as it goes along, greatly speeding up searches. The search facility also enables you to pinpoint results quickly by filtering them according to criteria such as whether the keyword appears in the header or body, or how the message is labelled. This can be done successively to home in on the email you're looking for, but searches can't be saved for later use.

When we clicked on a message, we were surprised to discover that by default all graphics were displayed, included those hosted on a remote server. While some people might prefer emails to look the way their authors intended, this can be a serious privacy problem. Spammers often use requests for remotely hosted images as a way of telling if an email account is active. Options for disabling image downloads are pretty blunt, too; you can choose between on and off only.

Eudora's tools for composing mail are slick, and include some fun features such as MoodWatch, a sort of 'flame mail' grammar and spellchecker that tells you how aggressive your language is. Flexible template options are also available, and switching between the mailbox view, template lists and account information is a simple matter of clicking tabs in a similar manner to Opera.

Eudora is an easy-to-use email client, with particularly user-friendly search facilities. Concerns over security, however, together with a high price if you want to include Bayesian spam filtering, put it out of the running