More of this Feature • Part 2: Operating on Messages: Deleting and Retrieving

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There may be people who download everything. Chances are, though, you try to find out what you download before you go for it. With email, you normally download everything, every single message, be it "I love You" from your friend, be it "I love You" as a virus, be it your average spam.

This is not necessarily so, however. Smart POP3 servers (this is where you get your mail from) allow email clients to retrieve the headers of new messages only. Based on the sender, the subject, one or two lines of the body and maybe the size of a message you can then decide whether you want to download it in full or whether you want to delete it directly on the server.

Eudora

In Eudora, this functionality -- like a number of other nice and useful gimmicks -- is not obvious. Once you have discovered it, however, it is easy to operate.

In fact, it's almost as easy as checking mail. You all know the "Check Mail" button in Eudora, probably the menu command "File | Check Mail" and maybe the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-M. The "Check Mail" command checks for new mail and makes no fuss about it.

In this case we want the fuss -- and we get it. Combine "Check Mail" with the "Shift" key (on Windows; on the Mac, use "Option") and a whole new dialog of options unveils, providing what may be called a remote control for your email accounts.

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Retrieving Message Headers

To fetch the headers (and just the headers) of all messages on your email server, select first "Using options at left" and then check "Fetch all message headers to In mailbox". This will disable the other mail fetching options like, obviously, to retrieve all new messages (in full). At right, you can select the accounts that should be checked.

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What pops up in your In mailbox after you select "OK" looks like the actual messages. But if we open one of them, Eudora informs us that the message body has not yet been transferred. We can also tell that these messages are but mere headers by looking at the server status. The open diamond indicates that the message has not yet been retrieved.

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