Future Eudora Based on Thunderbird 264
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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Honestly, I hate Outlook as much as anyone here, but this just isn't true. The Oulook Outlook Express UI has been more or less the same for years.
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And it won't likely ever.
MS stopped development on Outlook Express long ago (5 years or so, I forget).
I think the only changes made in several years were default changes to make it more secure. It no longer runs scripts by default, etc. Might have also been a few changes to make it fully XP compatible.
Too bad, despite my general aversion to MS products, OE inspired a whole new generation of mail clients. For it's time, it was revolu
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I've used Outlook (full) for the last 6 years. The UI *has not* changed significantly over that time. Fact.
Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio (Score:4, Interesting)
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No need to name call. Yeesh.
Anyway, they do have a little in common. If you uninstall OLE you'll kill Outlook. I've done it before, heh.
"How many times have you upgraded in that time? The UI has changed considerably from Outlook 2000 to Outlook XP."
It's not that different, at least
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Heh yep. I was surprised, too. There was DLL with OL in the name that disappeared.
"I guess it's all a matter of opinion. From what I remember of the last version I tried, the UI appeared to have changed quite a bit."
Yes, it's a little daunting at first. The color scheme is different and they added a couple of buttons to categorize teh various options. In that respect, yes, it's different. In my case, I went from OL2K to OL2K3. Big change, right? I looked at the sc
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Can you read? I said we've used the *full* version of Outlook for the last 6 years (and yes, I know Outlook Express has a different code base, though that has little to do with the look/feel of the UI). We have upgraded *with every new version*. The UI and functionality of Outlook (the full version) has changed *but not that much* over the last 6 years. Fact.
Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I thought it was obvious that he'd left out a "/" in "Outlook Outlook Express and that he was saying that the two apps haven't changed much. But I can understand how you might have interpreted it as you did.
I still think his point is valid -- there have been tweaks to both programs' interfaces, but to say that the UI has been radically redesigned every release as the OP did is pretty far out there.
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I don't quite understand your point. I was responding to the idea that you'd call someone an idiot because he referred to Outlook and Outlook Express together in a discussion of UI. It appears (from other posts) that the OP was interpreted differently by me and the person to whom I was responding.
But given that this is
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I agree, there have been *some* UI changes. But the parent post implies radical changes from version to version. I've used Outlook (full) at work for the last 6 years, and over that time, the UI has not changed very much at all. Some, but not much.
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Why, to this day, is expunge still not an automatic thing with them?
Oh yeah, because of Exchange - but why does OE still suck with IMAP?
And subscriptions is still a convoluted mish mash of un-intuitive MS bantery.
Makes perfect sense though (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The reason I used Netscape Communicator from the moment it existed, replacing Eudora which I was using before, is that Eudora (at the time) simply could not do a decent job of displaying MIME mail. The whole idea is basically a web page in email, trust the web browser to get it right. Today I use thunderbird, for much the same reason. Well, that and the plugin architecture. I love anything extensible :)
But really, I think the real reason they're going to stop selling Eudora is that this is a relatively
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Re:Makes perfect sense though (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoy.
HTML and Security (Score:2)
If it's actual displaying of html you dislike, there's the menu option "View/Message As/Plain Text".
More importantly though, if it's security you're worried about,
by default Thunderbird won't display anything but embedded images...
you have to explicitly tell it each time you view an email if you want it to load
any referenced images... so there's no security leak there.
as well, it has a similar (on by default) feature of disabling any scripting in the h
Nice theory, but incorrect (Score:2)
Once Eudora added the option of letting IE widgets render email previews, it became vulnerable to the same security risks.
I used Eudora for several years. The main reason I stopped was they didn't have a Linux version, much less a compatible code base that would let me move from OS to OS without tossing all my email history.
To be honest the only thing Eudora did that I really miss with Thunderbird is the email filtering. Eudora had useful filtering capabilities that work. Thunderbird's filtering is
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You've got that right. It's always been kind of an orphan that they don't quite know what to do with. Quite a few years ago I interviewed for a technical manglement position in their Eudora group, but I kept getting the feeling that they didn't know what to do with it. On the one hand, it doesn't make enough money to kept under the Qualcomm umbrella as current product. On the other hand, the name recognition is high and it's their oldest ongoing prod
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Like when they abandoned plaintext '>'s as quoted-text indicators, and replaced them with semi-HTML-based grey left-margin bars? Even for non-HTML, plaintext mail? And acted wonky if you tried to insert or remove any linebreaks in quoted text?
Eudora's been broken for something like five years now.
Real men use ASCII (Score:2, Funny)
Seven Bits??? (Score:2)
Good! (Score:2)
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The old Eudora used to just have the menu bar up top and allow you to open and place any window independently. It took a while to get used to it but it was sure nice once you had it configured.
Seems like it's all more or less the same these days with the "known paradigm" of UI becoming more importan
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If you drag the bar between the message list and the view pane down to the bottom, you can double-click to open messages in separate windows. (Or even if you don't, but the point is, the view pane will be gone from there.) Once you drag it down past a certain point (just past where the header starts scrolling off) it pops down, so I assume it's not
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If you want to isolate the folder tree into a separate window, you cannot do that. Similarly you cannot isolate the message list for a folder into a single window.
While these are not crucial for the casual user, they are two power user features that I would definitely like to see. They come quite handy when dealing with a mailing list flamewar^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussion in a threaded view or with 40-50 folders prefil
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People still use Eudora? (Score:2)
Re:People still use Eudora? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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There is nothing else that worked as well for me.
Outlook stores everything in one huge binary blob, just waiting to get corrupted. Terrible. With Eudora I know that no matter what happens I can get my emails out.
Thunderbird is an attractive alternative, but it stores attachments with the emails. For me this would give me mailboxes in the Gigs. Eudora automatically separates the attachments into a separate directory and puts a link to the file in the actual email.
This is a great thing (Score:2)
are prevented from going with that non-portable klient-O-krap from Redmond by this development.
Good deal (Score:2)
Well, that and I liked playing Quake2.
Lordy, could I railgun...And Yes, I cheesed it up with the BFG...
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hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Other than that, it's been rock solid stable for several years for me...
And I too would like to see GPG there by default, encouraging users to use it.
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Maybe the other way around (Score:2, Interesting)
Too bad it's not Eudora that's being opened. (Score:2)
What's really too bad is that they're not open-sourcing Eudora as it exists today, so that Thunderbird could benefit from the last 15-odd years of experience that they have. That's the direction that it sounds like things need to go in.
Instead, they're going to throw all that away in favor of TBird's codebase, which is apparently unstable and generally a mess, and then open-source that. Well great; it'll just be Thunderbird with a Eudora-like interface on it, and Eudora's interface wasn't great shake
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It's very odd that you have had these problems with Thunderbird. I've been using Thunderbird for many years (even the early versions) and I have NEVER had any of these problems. It's never crashed, never lost any email, no problems with contact lists, always counted messages correctly, never had to manually index...
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This has also happened to a friend of mine when he was trying Thunderbi
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Make a copy of the whole profile before you go trying to fix it though.
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No.
Because it's something that's never happened to me, it's not 'housecleaning that the developers expect users to do', it's something f*cked up on perhaps *one* users' computer.
Things not in TFA: (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I would worry less about Eudora becoming a dead-end fork of Thunderbird and more about Thunderbird becoming a dead-end fork of Eudora.
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This will change the way you think about mail.
You can search by date, person, attachment, in multiple pst files, all in a couple of seconds.
I bought it personally, use it at work. No yearly maintenance; while we are having a discussion regarding a subject, I type a bit on my keyboard, and I already have the thread. Others are searching for more than 5 minutes, sometimes an hour.
I look organised. I know how to search and which programs to use. :
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I'll miss it (Score:2, Interesting)
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Looking back, looking ahead (Score:5, Interesting)
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Every time software is 'set free' like this I see not only yet another confirmation that Stallman right
Eudora wasn't "set free". Eudora was effectively dumped.
The dumping is not unexpected (at least for Mac users) given the endless promising of a new version that actually used OS X. It just sucks that they put it off for so long. They'd had been promising a complete rewriting of the OS X version since Tiger was released (Apr 2005). Now they're starting over again. They're not releasing Eudora's source
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That's all there is to it. This way they can spend a few months (with their current developers) modifying Thunderbird to somewhat resemble Eudora a little bit, then wash their hands of the whole thing.
Thunderbird's better (Score:2)
One thing that IS superior in Eudora? Multiple signatures.
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Man time sure flies.
Business model? (Score:2)
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Seems this is just a graceful way of moving on and trying to avoid any ill will from current users.
Jury's out (Score:2)
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 (Score:2)
Who Can't Read Either? (Score:2)
Ugh (Score:2)
Penelope (Score:3, Informative)
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope [mozilla.org]
Debian renames Thunderbird as LightningPigeon (Score:2)
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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL (Score:2)
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?
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Yeah, because PostgreSQL's codebase is lean and clean. Oh...wait...
PostgreSQL is one of the best open source products, all categories, in my opinion, and definately is powerful enough to live in the corporate world (even more so if one considers things like EnterpriseDB, etc). However, the codebase IS a mess. They did wonderful lately to clean it up, but s
I Miss Mulberry (Score:2)
If they wanted to build a Outlook killer... (Score:2, Interesting)
And furthermore... (Score:2, Insightful)
WP5.1 -- the last true master (Score:2)
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 co
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lol what? (Score:2)
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But... (Score:2)
Consolidation is great! (Score:2, Informative)
It's encouraging to see big names like Qualcomm em
About a year ago I upgraded from Eudora 3.51 to (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Debian will have to come up with something else, of course.
Why companies switch out engines (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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I still use Eudora for its portability... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Just an FYI, it can definitely do that now.
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We used to use this feature to setup multiple email setups on a machine with interens using it. Intern1 double click THIS shortcut for your mail; intern2 use THIS shortcut (this was back in the pre-Win2k days when we still had Win98 machines floating around in businesses).
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Pine is still my preferred mail user agent, actually, and Eudora used to be my favorite alternative (until my beloved NeXT Mail app, which had become somewhat inconvenient to use, came bundled with a newer, more viable version of its host OS).
My employer, however, prefers the use of Lotus Notes... probably because they own that company.
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I saw the name Eudora and thought I accidentally traveled back to 1995.
Nonsense. I'm almost positive if you time travel, it generally has to be on purpose.
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