The beta version of Eudora 6 is now available for download. The major revision in this version, as one might expect with the recent trend in email clients, is a spam filter. Apple’s Mail app probably took a big chunk of the Eudora market for the Mac, and other Windows apps may very well be doing the same.

Eudora’s response so far seems a fairly good one. I had been waiting for Mail to become more feature-rich, and then switch to them full-time, but if Eudora’s spam filter works well, I’ll stay with them. And so far, after a bit less than a week, it’s been doing well–the filter seems well-trained, and is doing a good job of sorting. Time will tell on that, though.

For the Mac, a new mailbox drawer will pop out the side of any mailbox window, allowing you to easily select a different mailbox for that window to display. It is a lot easier than going up to the menu bar all the time, and deal with multiple windows. They also say that something called “Content Concentrator will be available for both Mac and PC versions, and a format painter will be available for the Windows version.

Eudora has always been a very strong email client, flexible, good interface, very configurable. The down side is that in the past, the address book and filters have been a bit buggy for me. Let’s hope those have been improved some. Also, as with prior Eudora betas, this one has an extended settings control panel, with lots of extra controls you don’t get in their standard releases. I wish they kept the longer list, but hey…

Eudora comes in free and paid modes. The main difference is that the free mode puts up a small ad window (140 x 150 pixels) that cannot be moved from the periphery of the main monitor. If you have a small, low-resolution monitor (like with the old clamshell iBooks), this may be too big to stand, but with a better monitor (like the 1280 x 854 monitor on my Powerbook), you get so you hardly even notice it.