Eudora Volume License

Eudora Volume License

We bought a 25 user license for Eudora 5.2 from Qualcomm and I thought I would post some information about what we got, since the Eudora web site is notably vague, and there isn't any mention of the volume license program in the newsgroup that I can find.

For about $700 we got a certificate for 25 users, a CD and 4 pages of instruction by next-day mail. As I had hoped (but couldn't find anywhere promised on the web site) the CD includes support for making a customized version of Eudora that reduces the amount of per user setup.

We bought the package directly from Qualcomm after several distributors listed on the Eudora web site said they sold only licenses, and we would have to download the program from the Qualcomm web site. It appears that if we had done that we would have missed all the customization software.

The customization process is described in the 4 pages of documentation, which were accuate once you made allowance for the fact the files on the CD had been zipped up (which made the details of the instructions a bit off).

As we went through the installation creation wizard we were able to add the following new default values to the eudora.ini file:

The wizard only prompts for a couple of the settings we used. A few were taken from the Eudora reference manual (see pages 305-327), one was determined by setting the option in a running copy of Eudora and examining the eudora.ini file for changes, and one came from Eudora tech support. You get 6 tech support calls with a 25 user license.

There is a another list of the eudora.ini settings at http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/ini.html but it has the same omissions as the manual.

The wizard is a bit of a bother, I expect it would be easier to just add these settings to the instopt.ini file, but we didn't discover what was going on till we were done.

A last bit of customization we wanted to do was to add the SSL certificate of our Pop server to the list of trusted certs in Eudora, so that users wouldn't be told it was untrusted. (Eudora is pretty stingy about whose certs it will recognize, pretty much Verisign only, AFAICT). Eudora Tech support said this wasn't possible, but it turns out to be easy. We went to a working Eudora 5.2 installation where we had gone through the Eudora menus to add our cert and copied the usercert.p7b file into the directory from which Eudora installer read its files. Then we told the wizard to copy this file when doing an install. This had the effect of adding the line:

We have only a single test installation so far, but it seems to work, and the prospect of avoiding the per user installation instructions is very nice. I have no idea why Qualcomm doesn't advertise any of this - it seems like a pretty big deal to us not to have to walk people through installing "esoteric features" over the telephone!

No doubt I have some of this wrong, so comments are welcome.

Daniel Feenberg (feenberg at nber dotte org)
(with thanks to Mohan Ramanajan (mohan at nber dotte org))