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Mozilla Quietly Resurrects Eudora
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Sep 05, 2007 03:20 PM
from the thunderous-applause dept.
from the thunderous-applause dept.
Stony Stevenson writes to mention that the Mozilla Foundation has quietly released the first beta version of the revised Eudora email application. This is the first development Eudora has seen since Qualcomm stopped development and turned it over to the open source community in 2006. "Eudora first appeared in 1988 and quickly became one of the first popular email applications, enjoying its heyday in the early 1990s as it developed over the early days of the internet. Use of Eudora began to wane in the mid-1990s as the third-party application was muscled out of the market by web-based services such as Hotmail and bundled applications such as Outlook."
Linux.com has a bit more explanation about why many may not consider this simply a new release of Eudora. According to the release page the new Eudora application is not intended to compete with Thunderbird, but instead to complement it.
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Mozilla Quietly Resurrects Eudora
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Who knew? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Who knew? (Score:5, Informative)
Though I've been recommending Thunderbird to my friends and clients for what seems like forever, I could never convince myself to give up Eudora...
fwiw, adding IE rendering was totally a reaction at the time to the burgeoning popularity of Outlook and HTML-formatted emails. Thankfully it was optional and could be turned off, leaving Eudora as bulletproof as before.
It's been said... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://drblast.blogspot.com/)
I guess Eudora, now based on Thunderbird, finally can make that claim.
Re:It's been said... (Score:4, Funny)
In that case . . . (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Thursday December 30 2004, @06:43PM)
hawk
That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
features added by the Eudora developers, "Penelope" is an extension (also
called an "add-on") that is used in Eudora and can also be used with
Thunderbird. The Eudora installer includes the corresponding version of
Penelope along with it so there is no need to install Penelope if you are
installing Eudora. Most features in Penelope can be accessed when used with
Thunderbird, but there are a few that require Eudora in order to work
correctly and it's not something that gets tested."
Can anyone un-WTF that paragraph for my tired little brain? Eudora is basically like Thunderbird, and Penelope is an extension that works with either to make it behave like...Eudora? Wait, what?
Re:That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good move for the Thunderbird engine, in that context - get millions of new users who don't have to change their ways.
Re:That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:5, Funny)
It's so simple, anyone could understand it. Sheesh.
Re:That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:4, Funny)
(http://kehoes.org/ | Last Journal: Friday August 10, @04:32AM)
Re:That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, except that they haven't. (Score:5, Informative)
When I saw this yesterday, I actually experienced a few seconds of excitement that there might someday be a good X11 mail client. But then I looked a bit further into what it is they've actually created here; functionality-wise, this mostly appears to be Thunderbird with a few of Eudora's icons pasted atop.
If you take a look at the list of bugs submitted by users [mozilla.org], you'll notice that the vast majority of them are regarding the fact that this application behaves nothing like Eudora.
Very disappointing, I'm afraid. I hope that some day there will be X11 mail clients available that aren't simply clones of a clone of Outlook.
Lookin' good thunderbird (Score:5, Funny)
Thunderbird Oh Eudora, you're too good to me!
Correction and continuation: (Score:5, Funny)
Thunderbird: Oh Eudora, you're too good to me!
Outlook: What you doin' with my bitch, you Commie scum.
Eudora: Don't hurt Thunderbird! It's you I loved all along!
Pine: Might I trouble you kind gents for a bit of bread?!
Outlook I thought I told you never to come out of your hole again!
Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea... (Score:2)
I'd love to see a Mozilla branded 'hotmail' type of mail account I could use. I'd pay for it, if it had functionality that Gmail or Hotmail had but then again, why reinvent the wheel? The rich client for email is on its way out, thin clients are in.
That said, I think I'm the one guy on Slashdot that hates Gmail. I like Yahoo mail, and pay for it
Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea.. (Score:5, Insightful)
But I'm afraid that I may disagree with you on the broader topic. The reason I hate gmail is that it's webmail, and thus inherently something that is awful and should not be done. And indeed even more broadly, "web applications" are a terrible idea; the web makes a really crappy platform.
I would much rather have an elegant, well-designed, rapidly evolving application platform of my choice on which to run a variety of clients speaking well-defined protocols than try to retroactively turn a simple and reliable content-delivery medium into an entire operating system.
Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless I'm missing something, doesn't ssh and mutt/pine/elm/whatever also allow you to get to your mail from anywhere?
I do travel a fair bit, but I'm not willing to give my credentials and email to every random internet cafe machine I pass. And I have to admit, I'm kind of confused by people who are.
I'm really only willing to give my credentials to a machine that I trust, which mostly means a machine of my own. So webmail doesn't really allow me to get to my mail from significantly more places than I can just have a civilized client running anyway.
Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not saying that the rich web clients are great for some people, just saying there's still plenty of space for the full blown apps.
It's "Eudora" in name only, than? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.nojailforpot.com/)
So, it's really not Eudora, it's Thunderbird with some Eudora-like widgets thrown in. It's "Eudora" in name only, than?
Re:It's "Eudora" in name only, than? (Score:4, Funny)
Looking forward to this... (Score:2)
Time will tell...
Penelope? Eudora? WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, which is it? Are Penelope and Eudora the same thing or not?
Also, I hope this Penelope thing goes through the usual Mozilla trend of changing its name 4 or 5 times, because that name is just not doing it for me. Maybe they should just call it "Endora" since that's what every single person who called tech support about it in the old days called it anyway.
Eudora - Thunderbird (Score:2)
Complement pomplement - It's a competitor even if it runs on the same technology platform. But that's good, really good. I mean see what competition did to Mozilla/Firefox.
I liked Eudora back in the end of the 90s, not sure if I would nowadays, but I for sure will give it a try.
In todays news... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.infiltrated.net/)
Imports? (Score:2)
They can get very out of hand...
Excuse me (Score:2)
(http://www.spamgourmet.com/)
Eudora could use some help!
That (or something similar) was what Eudora used to say on Macs when it was having network problems or something like that.
Just out of curiosity. Are there people that still use Eudora? And if so, do they have a reason? I have a friend who has to have Eudora because "its all he knows", and the sad thing is that he does not know the program at all. Is there a need that Eudora fills?
I'm still and old-school *NIX guy that uses a mailer from a terminal. No GUI for me.
Re:Excuse me (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.hyperborea.org/journal/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 11, @05:30PM)
I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.
At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.
I haven't looked back since then, though I do miss the window layout. It's one of the few MDI designs I actually liked. Eh, there's probably an extension for Thunderbird. Other than Penelope, I mean.
webmail, &c. (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
*goes back to gmail*
Seriously though, the days where I used a full email client for personal email are long gone. I have Thunderbird installed here somewhere, I think, and every so often I use it to download and save my gmail messages, but really... webmail has long been the choice for people who are not especially paranoid. (Including businesses, which have to be paranoid for legal reasons, plus there's the bonus of having somebody to fire when something goes wrong with the email.) (I actually am a little paranoid, hence the Thunderbird-downloading-saving, but not enough to forgo the convenience of webmail.)
Re:webmail, &c. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.tringali.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 12, @03:10PM)
Wait, what? Sorry.
Re:webmail, &c. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time you want to do something in webmail you have to get a new page, wait, choose, wait, and so forth. With an e-mail client I don't have to wait at all, it's instantaneous. Or how about adding attachments in webmail? That's even more clumsy.
A bonus feature is that I can have my e-mail client open in the background, periodically checking e-mail, and it will alert me when I have received one or more of them.
Hey, I've got a better name for this product (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday February 07 2007, @10:52AM)
"PINE"!
It'll stand for "PINE is not Eudora!"
Whaddya mean, "Prior art"?
Why upgrade from my current Eudora? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.KateTheDog.com)
I used a plugin for Google Desktop briefly to index the old messages, but searching was no easier that the built-in search so I just stopped using it.
Eudora is the one I app I have that over the years when I heard there was an upgrade my first thought was "why?" rather than "Great, I've been needing an upgrade".
I also use Gmail, having selected mail from my server go to both my Eudora POP account and my Gmail account. That gives me remote access and another backup If I have some funky formatted email that I don't just toss out, I view it in GMail via Opera where I'm well insulated from malicious attachments.
Eudora: It's old, it's boring, it works.
I Remember that Bag-o-Crap (tm). (Score:2)
(http://www.kickthebobo.com/erotech/index.html | Last Journal: Friday October 26, @11:51AM)
et tu? (Score:1)
Translation: I come not to bury Thunderbird, but to praise it. That certainly explains this [mozillazine.org].
Subtle Vista bash? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is that a subtle bash against Vista? Or is it just my expectation of the open source commnity to knock a MS product whenever possible? Yeah, I know it probably means they just more thoroughly test XP compatibility, but I wouldn't be paranoid if I didn't question it.
Driver required? (Score:4, Funny)
That headline scares me (Score:1)
It came from her short story "Why I Live at the P.O."
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
If it's just Thunderbird with some extensions, what's the point in a new product?
It's making my mind wander to the old MSN Explorer of Microsoft, that was a customized Internet Explorer for their MSN network.
But at least MS kept the name reasonably similar to not confuse too much.
Wow (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I'm tagging this one 'phoenix'. Rather fitting, since they've already used that name on another product.
sylpheed (Score:2)
(http://freefall.homeip.net/)
I never really liked eudora that much, but back then I was an OS/2 user, so PMMail is what I used. And they ported that to windoze, so I kept using it.
Now I use sylpheed. It's a great linux client that has also been ported to windows. It supports local mailboxes on linux, pop, imap, ssl. It even runs great as a portable app off the USB drive when I am not at my own computers. This configuration works great with IMAP over SSL.
My only complaint is that there is no way to tell it to remember "Yes, I know I'm using a self-signed SSL cert, please stop pestering me about it".
Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, this is the initial release, intended for developers, not for end users. We're as aware as anyone that it is incomplete.
Thirdly, by "not a competitor", we mean that we intend to make all our work available to Thunderbird. It will be up to the TBird guys to choose what to integrate, of course, but in principle we think they'll take most of it, so that in the long run, the difference between the applications will be largely what they're called and what the default behaviors are.
EUDORA??? Yuck... (Score:1)
Ugh.
How is this not competition with TBird? (Score:1)
"According to the release page the new Eudora application is not intended to compete with Thunderbird, but instead to complement it."
WTF?
So does that mean a person can use Eudora and TBird at the same time? Oh I get it. Eudora for one mail account and TBird for another.
Nothing like real Eudora (Score:2)
Basically, it's Thunderbird. It just has a Eudora label. It does however snarf the Eudora icon from the desktop, and make itself default mailer, so be forewarned.
It finds existing Thunderbird mail folders and settings, not Eudora's, and acts like the Bird. I have multiple POP servers, and by default it puts their mail into separate folders, not the way Eudora handles it. It also lacks certain Eudora features that distinguish it from other programs. It doesn't have a "delete from server" setting per message (nice for killing spam). It doesn't seem to have Eudora-style labels. It doesn't have lots of folder windows open.
I hope those gaps get filled in; I may end up using my trusty Eudora 7 (which btw has great search features) for a long time to come.
WTF? (Score:2)