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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)
WARNING: Do Not Install Alongside Thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)
(http://johnhaller.com/)
The 1990s were the early days of the net? (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 19 2007, @10:15PM)
"Early days of widespread consumer Internet access" would be the 1990s, sure.
One mail and one PIM client, perhaps? (Score:2)
(http://uncensored.citadel.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 23 2003, @03:10PM)
In Search of Stupidity... (Score:2)
Hogwash.
These two can do nothing but compete. If the answer was "we're going to be merging Eudora and Thunderbird in the 3.0 release" then I might buy it. But otherwise, this is doomed to failure, and could have a substantial negative impact on both communities.
Consider the ill-fated Wordstar vs. Wordstar 2000 products, released under similar circumstances. Although not quite based on the same codebases (I believe Wordstar 2000 was actually based on a Wordstar clone that they had bought from some company), both had similar-but-not-quite-the-same user interfaces, ostensibly did the same things but-not-quite, and were released at the same time. In the end, amidst endless user confusion, features that were available in one but not the other (and vice versa) and a confused marketing strategy, everybody went and bought WordPerfect and Wordstar went straight into the shitter.
Eudora had some very innovative features for its time, certainly not seen in today's Thunderbird releases. I'm a Thunderbird user because I like the simplicity and I could never get Outlook to behave quite as I wanted to. However, let's not pretend that Thunderbird is really anything other than Netscape Mail 1.0 (circa the Communicator days) with IMAP support, a better HTML engine, and SpamBayes built in. I'd love to have more Eudorish features in my Thunderbird, but please provide them as an extension and not a wholly separate (and competing) product.
Loved simultaneous multiple tasks in Eudora (Score:2)
(http://www.krellan.com/ | Last Journal: Friday July 11 2003, @04:52PM)
My favorite feature of Eudora, that I miss most in Thunderbird, is the support for simultaneous multiple tasks.
In the lower left corner of the screen, was a square containing multiple progress bars for each task the program was handling at the moment. A good example would be for checking incoming mail on all of your email accounts.
Eudora would check each of them in parallel. You could monitor the progress of each server's transactions, by watching the progress bars. There was one progress bar for each server. Need to cancel a server that is acting slowly? Right-click on the progress bar and this was done, without disrupting the other servers at all.
In Thunderbird, to contrast, each server is checked one at a time. If a server has a problem, it will block all servers following in sequence. If you cancel, you lose all servers next in sequence as well. The UI of Thunderbird isn't really made to deal with multiple tasks. The best you can see is in the status bar at the very bottom of the window, and this gives no indication of progress, and often goes blank, even when more work is yet to be done.
This was really important back in the days of dialup, when everything was slow, not just email. You would frequently have to wait a long time for email to finish being received. So, having a good UI for this was important. Eudora made the wait a lot less frustrating, by keeping the user fully informed during all operations, and providing plenty of opportunity for the user to cancel a task without disrupting other tasks.
This would be very handy to extend to the newer features expected of modern email clients. Spam Bayesian sorting, filtering of email into appropriate folders, scanning for viruses, and so on, could all be handled as individual tasks using Eudora's interface.
This also becomes important when doing folder operations via IMAP. Thunderbird can get confused when a lengthy folder operation is disrupted, such as moving or copying all messages in a folder. If the user attempts to do something else during this time, the UI in Thunderbird often "forgets" the ongoing task entirely, and the folder will be left in a partial state. The user would then need to clean it up manually later. This isn't a problem with Eudora, thanks to this ability to smoothly handle multiple tasks at once, working each in the background until all tasks are cleanly finished.
I really hope they can bring this feature back, in the new Eudora! I was very disappointed when this didn't make it into Thunderbird 2.0, even though it was a fairly popular suggestion logged in the Bugzilla.
Someone tell me what's happening (Score:2)
There must be something behind this.
If they wanted a better email client, why not improve Thunderbird? Is it a dead-end?
Or there is some problem between the two developer groups?
I'm utterly ignorant of the inside events, i'm just a (happy and puzzled) user of Thunderbird and Firefox who wonders why aren't these better integrated on Linux.
Tb Must Die. (Score:2)
(http://vimrc-dissection.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday March 24 2007, @07:58AM)
So I wasn't alone who thought that Thunderbird - as well as its half-***** development - did sucked big time? I used it for 4(?) years. Piles of bugs which were never getting fixed with new improved GUI which took all development time to annoy with new even more weirder (or (re)moved) keyboard shortcuts, usual mail folder manipulation flops/crashes and inability to display certain messages at all.
Problem kind of went away since now I'm using more or less exclusively Web based e-mail systems. OMG, they are SO MUCH BETTER! than Tb. And often are SO MUCH FASTER!! .
And now, I see no reasons for Eudora resurrection other than some people being annoyed with how development of Tb is done and managed. Mozilla people clearly stated that Tb is to "go after Outlook Express" users. IOW, it's not for serious e-mail users. It's not something what Netscape Messenger was. And will never be. It's something you can't rely on. Nor should you in future. It's "Outlook Express" (c)ed by Mozilla with all relevant bugs copy-pasted.
Or could be any other reason in open source to introduce fork?
P.S. Thanks for news. I would give a Eudora shot. After of course it would grow a bit and stabilize a lot. ;)
AWESOME news (Score:2)
The main reason I still use Eudora... (Score:1)
I loathed simultaneous multi tasking (Score:1)
this story is completely pointless
*shrug*
Resurrects? Try murders... (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Thursday July 17 2003, @07:42PM)
2 - No more F-Key assignments (that's good enough for my 'bye-bye' right there)
3 - Each mail account (server/UserID) has its own In/Out/Sent/Trash, instead of the combined??? (nice one kids)
4 - Can't config the actual Mailbox window's columns (stuck with "Label", for example, forever???)
5 - HTML (gecko... so what) by default in out-going, bad scene kids, e-mail is a plain text thing, quit trying to turn everything into browser/advertising receivers, jesus, leave us alone
6 - All old Filters settings have been FUBAR'd at least to some degree
7 - All imported mailboxes are back to an "Un-read" state, and can only be cleared individually (have fun, corporate up(?)graders)
8 - No more 'Filter Reports' (which streamlined notifications, etc)
9 - Bouncing 'dock' or sound-only for notifies (hey guys, animation on the desktop is for girls, and a lot of them are way too smart to use it, too) See #8
These aren't a 'Top Ten', not even close. But, just as I feared, the Mozilla people have turned the most awesome email program ever into yet-another-Outlook, with BFD gecko rendering. Nice going. On a bright note, this played right into my predictions (which were based on the evolution of Firefox on the Macintosh, it's better in Linux, sort of). It amazes me that all these anti-Microsoft 'rebels' do nothing but emulate NT-era MS design choices in look and feel. Why not just make apologies and try to worm one's way back into the Redmond development arena?
I don't 'hate' Outlook, but, uh, guys, it already "Exists' you know what I mean? And on the Mac there's Gyaz, Mail.app, Thunderbird, et al, already, why add to it all? I'll keep it onboard, it's only the first version, after all, but if ZFirefox is any indication of what's to come, then the 'outlook' (sorry) is not good, to say the least. But, in fairness, the 'new' Eudora IS definitely the best windows/outlook wannabe on the Mac, so far. Nice going. (one hand clapping noise)
And yeah, yeah, I know, a user who learned Eudora, and dares to barf when it gets shredded by 'developers' is a troll, and again, so what... Oh yeah, I almost forgot:
10 - No more x-eudora-settings (off to Guantanamo with the lot of you)
quietly (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 19 2007, @08:17PM)
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday March 13 2007, @02:39PM)
It *was* the email client of choice a decade ago. It's reign long ago ended.
Re:Ah, Eudora (Score:1)
(http://beckerist.com/)
Re:A sad day (Score:2)
(http://pyile.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @01:33PM)