The good news is that the Mac community is friendly and active, and a lot of people tried to help. The most promising suggestion came from a developer who solved the identical problem for himself by creating some AppleScript scripts using some development tools. Jay Batson is a programmer and CEO of Plum Canary, which makes the Chirp task and project management software for the Mac and Windows. While I haven't tested his Eudora migration scripts, he definitely understood the Windows-Eudora-to-Mac-Eudora migration problems and convinced me that he licked them. Check out Jay's SourceForge.net project for downloadable (command-line based) help.

A last note about e-mail: With my Mac environment becoming permanent, I'm giving thought to migrating again to Apple's Mail program, which I like quite a bit. The only thing really stopping me is the lack of export options out of Apple Mail. What if I don't like it? On other hand, it's not like Eudora's maker, Qualcomm, offered any help whatsoever, even for migrating between its own e-mail software versions. I'm sure I can figure it out if I have to.

Mac browsers

In other software news, I've spent a lot of time testing browsers, including Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera and OmniWeb. I've come to a hard conclusion: There is -- surprisingly -- no ideal browser on the Mac.

Like many Mac users, I have come to like Apple's Safari quite a bit, even though from a usability standpoint it has not kept pace with OmniWeb, Firefox, or Camino. (Let's hope that the new version of Safari coming in OS X Leopard 10.5 makes major strides. I have my doubts that it will.) On the plus side, Safari is lightweight, renders pages well, is fast, and delivers 80 percent of what I need.