[goldenbear]

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...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.

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I'm in the same boat, except I only have hundreds of messages /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
So, development will now stop on this version of Eudora... How's that any different than what we've seen the past five years?
Most likely, I'll move to Mail at some point, although I've been saying that for five years...

[Dan Frakes]

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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).
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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.

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You might consider Entourage. It matches many of Eudora's search and filter features, and surpasses them in some cases. And it handles multiple email accounts and addresses well -- I've currently got 17 different accounts/personalities.
(On the other hand, no email client provides as many customization options -- via x-settings -- as Eudora. And I do have complaints about Entourage; don't take this as me saying it's perfect.)

[Nobody]

For me Eudora is the best e-mail client. Capable of handling hundreds of mailboxes with thousands of messages each. And really quick searching. I only hope that they keep the look and feek and that the new version imports the current Eudora messages. Long live Eudora!

[jmincey]

The look and feel of Eudora is archaic and apart from aesthetics, it's not conducive to managing and configuring multiple accounts. If you have adapted your muscle memory to Eudora's eccentricities, more power to you, (I count myself among those who have done this), but that doesn't make the Eudora UI a good one.
I have never seen a single-window UI prevent the option of using multiple windows. So I contend this is a false dichotomy. In contrast, a multi-window UI approach does disallow the integrated, single-window option.
Some of us don't want to cycle through innumerable windows like a deck of playing cards. I like the one-click access of integrated windows.
Sure, there are times when I want to have a window dedicated to one module, or one message, or one address book record, etc. And I would be strongly opposed to any mail client that did not provide this option. But I fail to see the virtue in disallowing an integrated tri-pane window even as an option.
Several e-mail clients allow these panes to be user-customizable. I can choose the module I want to display in a certain pane and I can re-order the panes or reconfigure their shapes. Lotus Notes, for example, provides a single-pane option, a two-pane option, and a three-pane option, and the position, dimensions, and contents of these panes is entirely at the discretion of the user.
Eudora in contrast, is a click-happy interface. It does not have a logical grouping of settings clearly laid out.
Yes, Eudora has had good search capability -- no question about it. But how long can this one feature carry an e-mail application which otherwise suffers from neglect?
We will see what lies ahead, but Qualcomm does not exactly inspire faith.

[NeoX]

Hey, I agree with Jeff! /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif
Really, though, announcing that they are going to base the next version of Eudora off of thunderbird is not really something I would be proud of if I were Qualcom. I have tried to be supportive of Thunderbird by using it with a few of my accounts, but honestly I find it to be a mediocre client at best. I know it has been debated on to death but thunderbird has an ugly non-Mac interface. It is not intuitive if you have multiple pop accounts with their own SMTP servers. It is very glitchy, the performance is nothing good and the list goes on.
Why not just make the actual Eudora source code open? I would bet you would have more of a response from Mac users then with a new mozilla based thunderbird wannabe... /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

[spiderbat]

Eudora was the program that ushered me to the world of actual e-mail use. The research institution I'm cooperating with, the italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, established one of the first nation-wide computer networks in my country, based on VAX computers by Digital: the e-mail facility was present, but you had to start a telnet session and access your messages through a primitive CL interface. Even when internet took the place of our private network, the procedures didn't improve and e-mail remained for me little more than hassle, until the day a colleague of mine, a friendly researcher on leave of absence from New Zealand, showed me Eudora: a program that brought my fresh mail onto the desktop of my Mac, and allowed me to compose messages, attach files, archive, with the friendliness of the Mac UI was a marvelous discovery, something that changed my attitude completely.
There have been milestone-moments in my computer life, when I've first experienced something that made me really excited about: when I first saw, on the 13" monitor of a Mac II, a color photo that could be termed "realistic", or when I first connected my Mac SE with a music synthesizer through a MIDI interface; well, I may say that my encounter with Eudora was one of those moments.
Since then, I've been a faithful user of Eudora until a couple of months ago, although I agree that its development was lagging behind its competitors. Maybe I had got accustomed to the look and feel, maybe I didn't like to throw away the customization I had done of it, through its filters and by means of AppleScript. Last July, our system manager forced us to authenticate with the SMTP server in a way that I wasn't able to perform with Eudora (and searching support info at Eudora's site showed clearly the state of neglect of Eudora's development for the Mac platform). I eventually switched to Apple's Mail and, all in all, I'm not disappointed, but Eudora has still a place in my heart, and in my Mac, to manage the tons of archived e-mail I accumulated in the years.
If all this sounds like an eulogy, well, that's because I fear that, even if a future e-mail client named "Eudora" will be thriving in the internet arena, it will be something barely resembling the application I used to love.
P.S.: if only the "Mail" developers at Apple would get fixed soon that nasty bug that makes almost impossible to automate message-replying, etc., via AppleScript!

[whitedog]

Qualcomm's development, or lack thereof, of Eudora is typical of what often happens when a big company takes over a successful small business or program. What Microsoft has done with Virtual PC is another sad example. It makes you wonder why they bother if they have no intention of keeping the product current and competitive. In the case of Virtual PC, the folks at Connectix were either very smart or very lucky to unload VPC while it was still a viable product and escape the expensive necessity of re-engineering it for the Intel Mac platform, something Microsoft certainly could have done but chose not to do. Qualcomm, on the other hand, has run Eudora into the ground, milking the brand equity and giving very little back to the user community. In both cases a big business failed to compete in the marketplace, falling prey to inertia and ennui.
That Steve Dorner has supposedly continued to work on Eudora while it was at Qualcomm is a sad testament to the degradation of his once exalted vision, energy and enthusiasm. Clearly they never gave him the resources he needed to keep Eudora in the game. It's no surprise he approves of the move to Mozilla and open source. He probably hopes it will find there the support Qualcomm never saw fit to provide.
That said, I still use Eudora as my primary e-mail client. I've found nothing sufficiently compelling in the limited feature set of Apple Mail or Entourage to cause me to switch, though I can understand why others might.

[SeaFox]

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Qualcomm's development, or lack thereof, of Eudora is typical of what often happens when a big company takes over a successful small business or program.

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I often wonder what would have happened to Eudora if it had stayed in the ownership of the Univeristy of Illinois Board of Trustees.

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What Microsoft has done with Virtual PC is another sad example. It makes you wonder why they bother if they have no intention of keeping the product current and competitive.

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Because then they can get rid of it, in Microsoft's case. Just like when Connetix wrote that Playstation emulator and Sony bought it and then discontinued it.
I have to agree to the earlier sentiment. This is Eudora, in name only. The title of this article ought to be changed too. None of the Eudora code is being released, so it's incorrect to say Eudora is being open sourced. "Thunderbird to fork into new Eudora client" would be better but most people don't understand the term "fork". How about "New version of Eudora to be based off Thunderbird"?