[MW Forums]

The venerable Mac e-mail client Eudora will see new life as an open source application based on Mozilla Thunderbird. more

[jmincey]

Eudora to go open source -- translation, Eudora as we have known it will be scrapped and the code base shelved. Only the Eudora name will continue because inexplicably it still has a cachet among some diehards in the Mac and Windows communities even though under Qualcomm's stewardship the product has been lagging for several years -- especially under the Mac platform.
To say that this product has had a long and storied history would be accurate (in regard to the Mac) until about 1999. After that, development ceased outright (for all practical purposes). The few additional features from the year 2000 forward were not organic improvements to the e-mail experience itself but instead were contrived add-ons which in some cases were almost farcical.
Eudora suffered from neglect in its UI, in its inferior HTML support, in its lack of integration with other technologies, and in Qualcomm's ridiculous pricing model.
This announcement is but a formalization of what has been clear for the last several years -- Eudora has been dead as a dynamic product still under development. And now Qualcomm seeks to wash its hands of the whole mess, but rather than come clean with its customers on this, it has chosen the open source route.
There's just one problem. Eudora's code is not being turned over to open source. Qualcomm wants Eudora development done by proxy (in the open source community) while it can continue to cash in on the Eudora product name. Mozilla will now perform the heavy lifting for Qualcomm.
Mozilla's code has spawned a number of bona fide products in the web browser market -- Camino being one example. I'm not optimistic, however, that the same can be done well on the e-mail side -- and in any case not with Qualcomm specifically.

[ddd1301]

I liked their Palm client, but as security became an issue, I had to move on to other email clients. To bad they let this product die.
I see no purpose in rewriting this using the Open-Source community. There are other better products available.

[Jamus]

I think you hit the nail on the head about Qualcomm... Eudora was a potent email client, but they let it die on the vine years ago. My best guess is that it will be similar to the Netscape scenario: Mozilla Org makes the code, then Qualcomm takes a branch of it, slaps a Eudora name on the product, and tries to keep the ball rolling.
I would have hoped they would have done a full code release, or at least give it a quick dignified death, but I think they are trying to milk the Eudora name for all they can.

[ToeKnee]

Quote:

---

...To say that this product has had a long and storied history would be accurate (in regard to the Mac) until about 1999. After that, development ceased outright (for all practical purposes). The few additional features from the year 2000 forward were not organic improvements to the e-mail experience itself but instead were contrived add-ons which in some cases were almost farcical...

---

I agree, but I still use Eudora for those incredible abilities that no other client seems to match, even now... the amazingly powerful filtering and search capabilities (still better than Spotlight Mail searches, so much more customizeable). Until I refused to pay the most recent upgrade charge, the junk mail filter was beyond compare, because it uses scoring... when it came time to look through the junk folder for false positives, you can sort by "likelihood," and without a doubt, the few false positives will all be grouped towards the "low confidence" side for quick retrieval (if Gmail's spam filtering could do that, I'd be in heaven).
The ability to quickly change and configure new "personalities" is only starting to be approached in flexibility by Mail. I have literally dozens of e-mail addresses for my various domains, sites, and activities, and Eudora can keep them all quickly sorted. And something often cited as a downside of Eudora, the lack of a unified window interface, is one of its strong points as far as I am concerned. I have various inboxes for my primary e-mail addresses, and they all can open when I check mail-- all my inboxes that have new mail open automagically for me to go through-- this is SO much better than having e-mail sorted to some folder in the hopes you'll notice it has new e-mail.
I have hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages over eight years stored in Eudora. If this functionality is ported to the new Thunderbird-based app, I'll move with it, but otherwise, I see myself using Eudora 6.2 until it refuses to run sometime in the next decade.

[bynkii]

Quote:

---

Eudora to go open source -- translation, Eudora as we have known it will be scrapped and the code base shelved. Only the Eudora name will continue because inexplicably it still has a cachet among some diehards in the Mac and Windows communities even though under Qualcomm's stewardship the product has been lagging for several years -- especially under the Mac platform.
To say that this product has had a long and storied history would be accurate (in regard to the Mac) until about 1999. After that, development ceased outright (for all practical purposes). The few additional features from the year 2000 forward were not organic improvements to the e-mail experience itself but instead were contrived add-ons which in some cases were almost farcical.
Eudora suffered from neglect in its UI, in its inferior HTML support, in its lack of integration with other technologies, and in Qualcomm's ridiculous pricing model.
This announcement is but a formalization of what has been clear for the last several years -- Eudora has been dead as a dynamic product still under development. And now Qualcomm seeks to wash its hands of the whole mess, but rather than come clean with its customers on this, it has chosen the open source route.
There's just one problem. Eudora's code is not being turned over to open source. Qualcomm wants Eudora development done by proxy (in the open source community) while it can continue to cash in on the Eudora product name. Mozilla will now perform the heavy lifting for Qualcomm.
Mozilla's code has spawned a number of bona fide products in the web browser market -- Camino being one example. I'm not optimistic, however, that the same can be done well on the e-mail side -- and in any case not with Qualcomm specifically.

---

What Jeff said.
Dorner's continued whinefest because he had to change how he did things, and the immature attitude taken in the release notes, absolutely horrid IMAP support, and the fact that Qualcomm obviously was doing as little as possible for the Mac side made Eudora a non-issue about ten minutes after OS X came out.

[tekkster]

As objective as I'd like to be, I can't help but be a little sad that Eudora, long the king of email in the commercialized internet's early days, is changing so dramatically. Maybe it's a new path for Eudora to help extend its life. But it's a major change nevertheless.
I started out using VI/Pine before switching to Eudora in 93 or 94 or thereabouts. What a revolutionary experience that was! I loved Eudora and couldn't imagine using another email program for quite some time.
Though I've long since moved on to other email programs, Eudora always represented a nostalgic era. With this announcement, I can't help but feel it's the last dying cough of the internet's early tentative forays into the commercial world an an effort to graduate from it's military and education roots. It almost feels like programs like the early Mosaic browser, Eudora, and NetScape should be in a museum somewhere.
Just for kicks, I've set up OS 9 on an old 8600, and loaded Eudora and Mosaic. Funny....Eudora works just fine. Mosaic works too (except where plugins are required, of course).
Just think, our generation, we were there, at that very beginning.
Wow

[Whit_G]

While I agree with most of jmincey's points, I agree more with ToeKnee's. Yes, development has been a joke for years. Yes, the interface is antiquated. But now many email clients have the ability to tweak just about every behavior that the app exhibits (Eudora x-settings)? For years, using Eudora, I've had my own custom email-viewing experience for years courtesy of my ability to completely overhaul the display colors (a feature I doubt Thunderbird has, or Mail will ever have), so to me everything else that's out there is dry and boring. I honestly haven't given any other client a chance (because I have few complaints), but I'm fairly certain that I would quickly discover many other missing features if I tried to migrate to something else.

[moose_n_squirrel]

Quote:

---

Dorner's continued whinefest because he had to change how he did things, and the immature attitude taken in the release notes, absolutely horrid IMAP support, and the fact that Qualcomm obviously was doing as little as possible for the Mac side made Eudora a non-issue about ten minutes after OS X came out.

---

Those are exactly the reasons I switched to Apple Mail. After many years I thought I would use Eudora forever, until I got tired of their bad attitude, bad standards support, and bad Mac support. And in the meantime, Apple Mail got a lot better.

[Jason Snell]

Quote:

---

I think you hit the nail on the head about Qualcomm... Eudora was a potent email client, but they let it die on the vine years ago. My best guess is that it will be similar to the Netscape scenario: Mozilla Org makes the code, then Qualcomm takes a branch of it, slaps a Eudora name on the product, and tries to keep the ball rolling.

---

My understanding is that Qualcomm is going to contribute several full- and part-time developers to this new project, and the intent is to build a new version of Eudora -- one that has features Thunderbird currently lacks -- on top of Thunderbird. The end result may be good, may be bad, but I'm somewhat encouraged by the fact that Qualcomm's basically going to pay programmers to contribute to an open-source project. So I don't think it will be Eudora "in name only," because the programmers contributed by Qualcomm are supposed to be layering some version of the Eudora experience onto the base features provided by Thunderbird.
As a Eudora user myself, I'm cautiously optimistic. Very cautiously.

[d00d]

On the other hand Jason, Netscape wanted to do the same thing with Mozilla. Clearly their efforts helped get Mozilla off the ground, but they completely abandoned it eventually and the idea of making their own custom web browser on top of the software.

[Deejemon]

So does that mean the full Cocoa re-write they were touting has been axed?
Thunderbird is good, but like Firefox, it suffers from being so platform-non-specific, and from its lack of support for native Mac (and Windows, for that matter) technologies (eg: Cocoa text fields, non-fake Aqua widgetry). I would hope that Eudora (the "Penelope" project, apparently) would be to Thunderbird what Camino is to Firefox.

[deemery]

I'm being forced to leave Eudora next month as I must have support for signed/encrypted emails, something Eudora has been promising, but not delivering for years.
Eudora filters need work, but they're still easier to set up than either Thunderbird or Mail.app, and that's very important to me.
I had all-but-committed to Mail.app until this announcement. Fortunately, I have another 30 days to finish my evaluation work before making a decision.
(I too have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Eudora messages to migrate... And there's my investment in mail filters.)
dave

[Deejemon]

Quote:

---

But now many email clients have the ability to tweak just about every behavior that the app exhibits (Eudora x-settings)?

---

defaults read com.apple.Mail
For system admins, Eudora's x-settings is actually one of the worst features of all. We expect to be able to shell-script (or at the very least AppleScript) user configuration and re-configuration, not just for a handful of users, but for thousands at a time. This is impossible with Eudora, because x-settings requires the weird and wonderful string to be put into an email message and then clicked. Aside from being completely contrary to safe link-clicking practices, it is 100% useless when it requires end-user interaction. When a server address is changed, how do you get this out to users when their settings are stored in a resource-forked binary data file. Expect them all to manually change it? AppleScript out an x-settings link and expect people to click it?
Yay to the end of the 18-year-old archaeic brick, and bring on the modern newness.