5:30 Design Tip

I know that Eudora 7.1 and how it works with Windows Vista has very little to do with designing a Web site but I have found so little information on the Web about this that I figured I would try to help out those who are running into some of the same problems that I did.

When I first installed Eudora 7.1 on my new Windows Vista machine I would get an error regarding the history file. The error would say that the linkhistory.tmp file was not found or access denied. I would also have issues with the filters.tmp file and other .tmp files saying they did not exist or that access was denied. I discovered that published ideas to turn off the Vista User Access Control (UAC) would indeed help this problem, but then Eudora would be configured differently. Also, I didn’t like the idea of disabling the Vista UAC because it is a security mechanism even though Microsoft admits to there being some problems with it.

After several hours of tracing what exactly Eudora was doing and finding some documentation on line about Windows XP and Eudora 7.1, I did finally get everything configured and made it work correctly. There are still a few unanswered questions, but hopefully this information will help someone to use Eudora 7.1 with Windows Vista.

In order to install Eudora you must have administrator privileges on your machine. This has been true for several previous versions of Windows. Previous versions of Windows would automagically run all programs in an Administrator account with administrator privileges. This is NOT the case with Windows Vista. Vista, as a security measure, will run all programs as a normal user even in an account with Administrator privileges. You must specifically tell Vista to run a program with Administrator rights. This is the key to running Eudora without all the error messages. I haven’t found a way to permanently set this using the start menu, but you can run it from there. Simply right click on the Eudora executable and choose the “Run as Administrator” option. If you utilize a desktop shortcut you can configure this to happen all the time. Right click on the shortcut and select properties. In the Shortcut tab of the properties click on Advanced. Check the check box that says “Run as administrator” and click on the OK button. Each time you start Eudora using the shortcut Windows will ask you if you started the program. While this is a tad bit annoying, it allows you to keep UAC enabled and still run Eudora.

If you were running Eudora and just ignoring the errors, which did work sometimes, you may have made some changes to the configuration that will disappear when you start running Eudora as an Administrator. This is where I got really confused. Perhaps a Windows aficionado can explain why at some point because it doesn’t make much sense to me. Unless Windows is running as the administrator it cannot write to the Eudora data directory that is initially configured. For illustrative purposes I am going to use the default Eudora install directories. When you start Eudora it copies everything from the install/data directory into a directory C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora. Windows uses *this* directory for everything so this is where your configuration is located. If you copy this directory over (make a backup of the original directory first, just in case) to your C:\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora directory then everything works as you would expect it to and your configuration is as you would expect it to be. My guess is that upon closing Eudora, Windows attempts to write your data to the actual Eudora directory but UAC stops it from doing this. I wasn’t able to confirm that. Why it copies everything to the VirtualStore directory in the first place completely confuses me. This causes you to have 2 copies of all your email, etc.

However, these steps helped me to get Eudora 7.1 working with Windows Vista. I look forward to the stable release of Eudora 8 and hope that the Mozilla project does something really great with an already great mail client!