Future Eudora Based on Thunderbird

theefer writes "Qualcomm announced that future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird email program. Future versions of Eudora will be free and open source, while retaining Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements. Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project, with a view to enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of both Eudora and Thunderbird. [...] The open source version of Eudora is targeted to release during the first half of calendar year 2007. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, Qualcomm will cease to sell Eudora commercially."

An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

Eudora was always an odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio - their primary business is wireless technologies. Eudora didn't really fit in, but to Qualcomm's credit it has been under continual development and revision to this date.

There's a decent Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] on it for anyone wanting to know the background, but basically it's been around for an astonishing 18 years. It's evolved gently as a mail client, so any Eudora user can use a new version quickly. Compare this with Outlook which radically redesigns the whole interface every release or so.

To be honest, Eudora probably isn't the simplest mail client in the world. But it's a very powerful, very secure client that's ideal for power users.

When I first heard about this move I went "uh-oh". But on reflection, this could be a good thing. Eudora has some really cool features that would work well in Thunderbird, and both products appeal to the same type of people. I only hope that they don't break Eudora in the process of changing it!

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

Well, you're an idiot then. Outlook Express is a completely different program to Outlook. They don't share a common codebase, they're programmed by different developers.

Wipe the froth from your mouth, boy. In case you hadn't noticed, end users don't give a fuck about the codebase or the developers' names. They're just a couple mail clients from Microsoft, one with more functionality than the other.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

I've used Outlook (full) for the last 6 years. The UI *has not* changed significantly over that time. Fact.

While Outlook 2000, XP, and 2003 look relatively simular at first glace, the menus to change various options are totally different. At work, we recently had to change everyone's settings to use authentication, and the instructions for changing it were completely different for each version.

Makes perfect sense though

Eudora was always the next best alternative for people who didn't want to worry about obscene things like getting viruses just by looking at emails through the Outlook preview pane. For people who were stuck running Windows but savvy enough to know that there were other email clients out there besides Outlook, it was really ideal.

Fast-forwarding to the present: As Thunderbird slowly gains acceptance as an alternative email client in its own right (due in no small part to the continuing success of Firefox) the combination of Eudora and Thunderbird technologies could only help Eudora. If they want to ride Mozilla's coattails to greater acceptance in the email program marketplace, they are certainly welcome to do so. Every time a company adopts open source, an angel gets his wings.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text

Enjoy.

Good!

Sounds good to me. I always like Eudora, and only dumped it when it became adware. I like Thunderbird, too, but Eudora had a lot more bells and whistles that I actually liked and used. Hope it comes out well.

I was just looking at upgrading Eudora...

Now, I will either wait until the new OSS version comes out or I'll switch to Thunderbird.

People still use Eudora?

People still use Eudora? Seriously, I used it years ago, but forgot it still even existed...

Re:People still use Eudora?

Eudora has a niche of us loyal users. Many, myself included, tried pretty much every other client out there and find ourselves coming back to Eudora for the reliability and the feature set.

It was one of only a few clients early on that supported multiple email accounts, and because of how it stores email in flat text files (as opposed to Outlook and some others) it was really easy to migrate your mailboxes and settings from computer to computer - even between platforms ie moving from Windows to Mac.

The filter tools are starting to show their age, but are still solid. There was a point where I would definitely say Eudora's filtering tools were the best in any commercial email client.

Hopefully both Eudora and Thunderbird benefit from this.

This is a great thing

A stable mail client that's been around 'forever', guaranteeing its future. I hope that many lusers
are prevented from going with that non-portable klient-O-krap from Redmond by this development.

Qualcomm wants an excuse to dump it

This reeks of Qualcomm just wanting to abandon Eudora, while not wanting to appear to be abandoning it to the Eudora userbase.

I can't imagine it making much sense trying to get Eudora working over the Thunderbird "technology platform". The whole design, architecture and frontend would be wildly different - it would be quicker to write Eudora features for Thunderbird from scratch.

Good deal

I remember back in the day, when i was considering making the jump from Winders to Linoox, Eudora was one of the only things that kept me in the MS world.

Well, that and I liked playing Quake2.

Lordy, could I railgun...And Yes, I cheesed it up with the BFG...

hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

Qualcomm and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project,

Hopefully this will do wonders for Thunderbird's reliability; I had to stop recommending thunderbird to clients because of the near constant complaints. Disappearing email, crashes, disappearing contact lists. At least 6 months ago, Thunderbird had all sorts of problems with mailboxes and indexes getting corrupted, which would lead to fun bugs like my clients checking their mail, getting 5 new messages according to the new message count next to the mailbox...and not finding the 5 messages actually IN their inbox. Some bugs related to the index not getting cleaned up properly when messages were deleted, and "rebuilding" the mailbox didn't fix the index; you had to completely remove the index files by hand. WTF?

It stunned me how much 'housekeeping' the Thunderbird developers expect users to do to keep it working properly, and how thoroughly they knew of many problems...yet had done nothing to fix them.

I'd also like to see some effort to make GnuPG configuration part of the default install and get users set up with a keyset...and encourage them at every step of the way to use signing and encryption with their email.

Things not in TFA:

1. A list of which parts of the "rich feature set and productivity enhancements" will be retained in the Thunderbird/Eudora.

2. Which license(s) the new Eudora will be using. Presumably, it'll be MPL, but TFA didn't say.

3. Whether Qualcomm considers this move as shifting Eudora into shutdown mode, economically, or whether they genuinely see a potential for future profits from the new FOSS Eudora.

Re:Things not in TFA:

Eudora FAQ [eudora.com]: "QUALCOMM has decided not to remain in the email market." Also, "QUALCOMM plans to stop trafficking advertisements [to the existing Sponsored mode] at some point during open source development."

If you read the Penelope page [mozilla.org] at the Mozilla Wiki, you'll see that the six core members of the project are Qualcomm employees. "QUALCOMM continues to have a keen interest in the users of Eudora, and is being kind enough to donate the time of the above staff members to the Penelope project." Rather than becoming faceless contributors to Thunderbird, they chose to continue the Eudora legacy.

This is good news

Even though I don't use Eudora, I use Thunderbird on OS X day in and day out. It beats Mail.app in many many ways, not the least of which its almost the one mail client on the platform where you can order your messages by read status, thus floating all of them at the top. If Eudora can help smooth out some of the features and squash some more bugs in Thunderbird that's clearly a win for everyone.

Hmmm...

Once the open source version of Eudora is released, Qualcomm will cease to sell Eudora commercially.

I was reading the blurb and wondering what kind of viable long-term plan that scheme has -- apparently they don't have one.

It's certainly laudable of them to wind it down so gracefully. Like a lot of others, apparently, I haven't used it in ages but there was a long time when it was the only decent GUI for Internet email. I ditched it when I switched to OS X and Entourage at home, and they make me use Lotus Freaking Notes at work, but whatever it looks like nowadays, it has to at least be better than the latter.

As a long-time Eudora user...

I'm saddened by this news. I've used Eudora since the early 1990s, except for one very painful stretch in the early 2000s where it was "strongly suggested" that I use Outlook at work. My favorite feature is the lightning-fast search functionality (which makes me look brilliantly well organized when someone asks about an email conversation from several years ago). I can't say I was fond of the programs ad sponsored option, though. Having your email program pitch the DVD version of Bambi is really annoying.

In the end, the program got really expensive -- maintaining an annual subscription is a slight embarrassment when the accounting department calls me to query the need to "buy another copy of the same program").

My big concern with the new version of the program is that it will prove to be a dead-end fork of Thunderbird code. I'll know for sure the moment I try to search my old mail folders in the upcoming open-source version. If it takes longer than a second, the baby's going out with the bathwater.

I'll miss it

I love the way that I can move my mail to a new computer just by copying the Eudora folder to the new install. I doubt that'll work in the new version.

Looking back, looking ahead

Every time software is 'set free' like this I see not only yet another confirmation that Stallman right about the absolute need for software to be free but also that his life's work since he first dedicated his life to free software has ensured that free software would inevitably triumph over software that isn't free. Those of us who have been around for several decades remember all too well when you needed a lot of money and official permission to even be allowed to create software. It was not fun and it was not a way forward. In an era when many things are becoming less free it is a significant comfort to know that software is becoming more free and is consequently better in so many ways.

A most excellent day!

Very good. VERY VERY good! Being a long-time user of Eudora (since 4.2, I think), I've been impressed especially with Eudora's search functions. Sorry, never using Outlook, I can't comment on that. BUT since shifting my own email client to Thunderbird due to IMAP flaws in Eudora, I've sorely missed Eudora's searching. It's the one major flaw in Thunderbird, IMHO.

Now that they're shifting gears to F/OSS, I'm *thrilled*. Time to go throw more money at both projects, as it's a most excellent day that my two fave email clients are merging! Woohoo!

Thunderbird's better

In my humble opinion, I'd recommend Thunderbird over Eudora any day. Eudora's GUI for IMAP folders (with the second inbox at the bottom??) is confusing at best. The way LDAP works in Eudora is lame (you have to open a particular part of your address book, type in the name, press Search, then use the address from there). It's always felt clunky, having to move windows out of the way, as EVERYTHING has its own window (filters, address book, etc).

One thing that IS superior in Eudora? Multiple signatures. You can select which signature you want on the fly.

I've always preferred the Netscape/Mozilla/Thunderbird client, mainly for the reasons listed above. Eudora, I think, started out as a mainly Mac program, and its interface hasn't improved in over 10 years.

One important question

How long before Debian comes out with the own version of this, too? If there was an issue about the logo in Firefox, I can only imagine what having code from a proprietary product will do.

Business model?

So much for a business model. I suppose they'll still have the big companies that will pay them for support, but how big is Eudora in the corporate field? And how much will they pay for a thunderbird clone?

Jury's out

I actually purchased Eudora 4 back some years ago - at the time I loved it. But it didn't seem to move along with the times. IMAP support never really arrived - it felt like they didn't really grok it, and treated it more like "POP3 using the IMAP command set" (e.g. silly issues like not being able to have your trash or sent mail as an IMAP mailbox).

My hope is that Eudora will take what's good from Thunderbird - like its IMAP support - and combine them with Eudora's strengths, such as filtering.

Attachment folder

Good news - might finally get rid of their unique mailbox format and the dodgy attachment folder feature.

Who Can't Read Either?

Did anyone else scan that headline and think "what the hell?" because they read it as "Fedora Based on Thunderbird?"

Ugh

Am I the only one that isn't welcoming this change? There is a benefit in having mail clients of different code bases. Choice is a good thing -- don't be so quick to give that up. I'd rather be able to choose from two quality, well-developed clients than choose from two, nearly identical clients.

Penelope

Penelope is the project name at Mozilla for those that are interested:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope [mozilla.org]

Debian renames Thunderbird as LightningPigeon

Who can see this one coming down the pipeline?

Time warp

I saw the name Eudora and thought I accidentally traveled back to 1995. I hope this new version of Eudora does not require me to update my version of Trumpet Winsock.

Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

Someone (I think on Slashdot) commented that Oracle will someday switch to ProstgreSQL, because their codebase has become too bloated and unmanageble.

Will there be a switch not by the user, but by the software makers themselves towards OSS? It would be interesting to see what real software developers of larger projects (Windows, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Filemaker) would comment here. Did some of you look into throwing out your codebase and starting with an OSS project, preferably BSD-licsence?

I Miss Mulberry

I still haven't found a crossplatform email client that's as featureful as the discontinued Mulberry client.

If they wanted to build a Outlook killer...

They would focus on pulling together email and calendar in a single open source app. The Eudora team could really accelerate this process. Until there is a unified application, corporate envvironments will not move away from Outlook...

WP5.1 -- the last true master

I tried to convert to Thunderbird. The user interface only worked if you used it the way the designers thought you would -- slowly and with a mouse. (It felt like going from WP5.1 to MSWord 1.0.)

Plus, the Thunderbird memory footprint is far larger. (WP5.1 to MSWord 1.0 again!)

And let's not mention that importing my mail data was a collossal pain in the patoukis. (Chorus, everybody!)

I will mourn this day. Though the apprentice Thunderbird has promise, it has killed the master before the teaching was complete.

lol what?

Why would I want a eudora-branded version of thunderbird when I can simply run thunderbird proper?

But...

Where Is The Money?

wtf?

I didn't even know Eudora still existed.

Great! I've used only those clients!

I used Eudora for many years until one day a failed message filter blew up and send 100,000+ messages to my own inbox. After that, Eudora crashed every time it tried to load, but then I grabbed a copy of Thunderbird, imported my mailbox and deleted all the filter-spam (over about 3 days...) and have been happily using Thunderbird ever since.

It was really that one fatal weakness to an unreasonable condition that made me switch in the first place, but I remember Eudora quite fondly. It did everything I ever needed it to - then, so does Thunderbird now. I'm sure whatever comes of this collaboration will only do good for both clients.

Oh Rly?

But does it run on Linux? Oh wait...

Most missed Eudora features

I switched to Thunderbird a couple of years ago, but there are a few Eudora features I really miss:

- making filters by right-clicking a message

- checking mail by right-clicking the Windows task button

- moving through unread email by using the spacebar

If these features were incorporated in Thunderbird, I'd be a very happy camper.

Long live Steve Dorner!

Eudora was the best Mac email client for a long time out there (with a huge following)! Now it's free. And please, no more Net2Phone ad campaigns :).

Consolidation is great!

I for one, as a sysadmin, have always encouraged the use of alternative email clients due to the insecurities and infections I've dealt with from Outlook and Outlook Express. However, I've always been kind of torn between T-Bird and Eudora since each has its pros and cons. Merging them (so to speak) into one client sounds very enticing to me. I can't wait to see how this turns out, because if it's good then I'll make it a standard for my whole department.

It's encouraging to see big names like Qualcomm embrace the open source community with a highly used program like Eudora. One by one, major software developers are trying out this open-source phenomenon, and a lot of good seems to be coming out of it...

Eudora has already changed...

Back in the day if you were in a mailbox view or something that didn't support typing things in, and you started typing, it would beep with the system sound at each keystroke for the first 10 or so keystrokes, before popping up a dialog box that read "You can keep typing if you want to but no one is listening right now..." or something to that effect.

Now onto the later versions of it, they would just pop up a box that read "No window supporting user input is open" or something like that on the very first keypress. Stupid. With the old version I would usually realize what had happened before the dialog opened. With the new one I had to close that dialog with the first mistake, and it didn't try to humor me at the same time. I found that alone massively annoying, but things like that kept up in other parts of the program for while, and that in conjunction with the adware and my move to OS X prompted my move to Mail.app.

Maybe Eudora will get some of it's original personality back. I mean even the name has more personality than most other programs out there:

Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty [art-bin.com]

-Mikey P

About a year ago I upgraded from Eudora 3.51 to

Eudora 5.1 reluctantly. The only reason I switched was that I migrated my mail to gmail via POP and the older version wasn't compatible.

I've been using Eudora since around 1997 and it's been just fine for me. One great thing about it is that it's completely portable. Back in the 20th century, I ran it from a zip disk that I carried from home to the office and back. I had all my mail with me and it worked great. With the advent of USB flash drives a few years ago, I ditched the zip.

I've never been infected with a virus, although lots of them have appeared in my mailbox. Automatically opening attachments as a default is a huge no-no, but all you /. folks already knew that.

That said, I've used Thunderbird here at the office for work email and think it's a great client, so I'm pleased to see this development.

New version name

I hope they decide to call it "thEUnDeORAbird".

Debian will have to come up with something else, of course.

Eudora's so old

Eudora's so ancient that I forgot about it ages ago along with other email clients like Mulberry. Who uses that stuff, anyway? I use a full-featured email client called pine. Oh wait.

Final version (7.1.0.9) is a performance dog

On reading the article and seeing that Eudora development is going to stop I decided to upgrade from 6.0.3 to 7.1.0.9. A big mistake from a performance point of view. Program loads several times slower and even just scrolling Tools -> Options screens is noticeably slower (i.e. enough to be a PITA, several seconds to display the next screen, versus instantaneous before). And this is after turning off the mailbox indexing thingy.

I upgraded for better handling of spam -- some were crashing 6.0.3 -- but it seems I have lost performance in the process. I am tempted to speculate that they left debugging code in the EXE, but we don't make those mistakes these days, do we? It has to be ironic that Google can send me its answer to a custom query spanning the world's 10 billion web pages faster than I can show the next screen of options on a locally running program.

YMMV of course.

Why companies switch out engines

This is a shame. I've always used Eudora on Windows, and for a long time on Mac. It's generally a useful, reliable program that allows me to customize it to act how I want it to.

I don't predict good things for Eudora from now on. This is not a knock against Thunderbird. It's because often, companies resort to open-source implementations when the remaining engineers can't properly update/maintain the existing codebase. I've seen it happen; either deadlines force your hand, or there's just too much low-level work to get the engine to support the new features you want. It becomes easier just to replace it wholesale and work from a better base.

It's generally an indicator that the expertise has migrated away from the company. Now, a company that _starts_ by using OSS as a base, that can sometimes work. But a big company that has always used it's own engine, 9 times out of 10, moving to open source is a bad sign. (the other 1 time out of ten, it's Apple.)

Original USENET post announcing Eudora

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.archives/msg/e 3bcb4c240c5827e?dmode=source&hl=en [google.com]

I used Eudora and supported it for awhile, in the mid-90's. It's main advantages were for power users. Back then, I thought that in every user was a power user waiting for an opportunity, so I installed it for them. Well, we all must outgrow our childhood dreams some day ...

What a horrible thing to do

Thunderbird is the Mozilla MailNews component built on the Mozilla toolkit code base with Gecko. This means that you get an e-mail client with a full web page rendering included. What for? For HTML mail!

This makes Thunderbird a bloated program. Who needs a full-featured web page renderer with their e-mail client? E-mails should be sent in plain text anyway.

The MailNews component isn't that great either. Sure, it's a good basic e-mail/newsgroup client, but that's it. The component has its fair share of bugs, too. A common joke between Mozilla developers is that finding bugs in MailNews is like finding hay in a hay stack.

polite way of saying "discontinued"

I think this is Qualcomm's polite way of saying "we're discontinuing Eudora and recommend that you move to Thunderbird". Nevertheless, it is a nice way of transitioning users from proprietary software to open source, since this way, they will be providing help with the migration.

Unicode?

I love Eudora and have used version 4.3.1 for more years than I care to think about. I was almost going to jump ship for Thunderbird, though, since it apparently reads unicode, and I'm hoping to have the occasional e-mail from China show as something other than gibberish.

I really hope that this union of Mozilla and Eudora will allow me to continue using the Eudora I already like and feel comfortable with, yet still be able to send/receive Chinese characters.

Cheap Insurance

This is a great opportunity to snatch up the latest and greatest at a bargain price. For a sawbuck, the existing fans can get a copy of 7.1 that will function till email becomes obsolete (or until the Thunderbird crew proves they have more moxy). Cheap or free. I'll take one.

A good thing

All I can say is "YEA!"

From a support standpoint, Eudora is a nightmare. It's base design required them to take a "bolt on" approach to features you find in standard email clients today like.

- multiple SMTP servers different from incomming mail server
- Different port numbers for SMTP servers
- Bad SSL implementations (historically speaking)

On top of that add cryptic error messages and horrible debugging tools.

Re:Hurray?

Back in the 1990's, the messages were kept in text files that were easy to backup and move to a different system (unlike Outlook and Outlook Express). When the manager at one company I worked for got canned for trying to get his boss fired, he walked out the door with a complete set of emails since he was the only manager to use Eudora. Not sure if that helped him or not since I heard he was unemployeed for a year and his wife was furious at him since they took a loan against her 401K to buy a house in uber-expensive Silicon Valley that she had to keep working.

I still use Eudora for its portability...

I have a big D:\Mail directory on my machine. I back that up and all my client-side mail is backed up. When I migrate to new machines, hard drives, etc, I reinstall Eudora and then just lay the old contents of D:\Mail back over the just-installed contents of D:\Mail. Even the INI files are kept in mail so my just-migrated copy pops open windows in their last positions...

I tried going to Thunderbird a few years ago. I couldn't make the switch because the Thunderbird search wasn't as good as the Eudora search and Thunderbird couldn't do simple things like sort search result dates in "date order". Maybe it's better now...guess I'll find out one way or another.

Re:Raise your hand...

I'll slightly raise my hand, cause it was last year. Hooray for universities who only support 3 of the worst mail clients -- Eudora, Pine, and SquirrelMail.

Re:Raise your hand...

The one I kept getting was "Adora." Or worse, "Adoro." I don't know how they managed to mangle the pronunciation that bad... it took me a while to figure out what they were asking about!

Re:Raise your hand...

What he said. Best Internet in Mt View. In the fishbowl.

Dan

Re:Raise your hand...

/me raises hand

OMG You just read my mind. Back in the day almost every non-techie over-35 internet
user called it "Endora". Ahh the days of WFWG3.11 dialup with trumpet winsock, troubleshooting
IRQ conflicts, talking users through navigating windows with thier keyboard because
the new modem they installed took the IRQ of thier serial mouse. To alot of developers'
credit back in those days, at least most applications did follow keyboard navigation
conventions.

Oh and the name "Endora" comes from a character on the TV show "Bewitched". Thanks
to Wikipedia for reminding me.

Err. I guess that makes me old too.

I used Eudora for quite a few years back then. Was very portable and easy to run
multiple copies on the same machine.

One thing I LOVED about it, being in a support position, was the "blah blah blah" button
that instantly showed full email headers. It made it easy to get end users to
get you full headers to track down spammers. It is way too difficult in OE and Outlook
for novices to view full headers. Tbird at least keeps it easy to find under the "view"
menu. I hope they keep the "blah blah blah" button for old times' sake though.

Re:Raise your hand...

Oh, hell yeah.