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."

Comments

An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Dynamoo]

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 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

[future assassin]

>o 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 Same with PagasusMail (Pmail) Its one hell of a email client but way too many features for the average email user unless they are willing to dig into it.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Frosty Piss]

Compare this with Outlook which radically redesigns the whole interface every release or so.

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.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[lordeldor]

I don't think eudora was an odd product for them at all. Especially considering they are responsible for Qpopper.

http://www.eudora-mail.com/products/unsupported/qp opper/index.html

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[mlk]

Outlook (full) has changed over each release, not completely, but things have moved about. Personally I think for the better.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Outlook which radically redesigns the whole interface every release or so.
>Oulook Outlook Express UI has been more or less the same for years.

Outlook Express != Outlook

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Frosty Piss]

What I meant to type was "Outlook / Outlook Express".

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

[Frosty Piss]

Yes... I didn't get the slash in there, "Outlook / Outlook Express".

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.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[telchine]

>What I meant to type was "Outlook / Outlook Express".

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. Other than the name, they have nothing at all in common.

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

How many times have you upgraded in that time? The UI has changed considerably from Outlook 2000 to Outlook XP.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"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. Other than the name, they have nothing at all in common."

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 in the sense that somebody who was used to an earlier version of Outlook wouldn't have to spend very long to adjust.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[mlk]

I use 2K at one site, and XP at a different site, while the UI is fundamentally the same, it does have a fair few differences. But yeah, not radically different.

I've only touched Outlook Express once and a while (years apart), and it has never seamed to change (I might have just been using the same version :shrug:) so I assumed you was talking about that.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[tokul]

But it's a very powerful, very secure client that's ideal for power users.

So that's why Eudora has abismal unicode and charset support. Real men use only ASCII.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Frosty Piss]

Well, you're an idiot then. Outlook Express is a completely different program to Outlook.

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

[ElleyKitten]

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.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

How many new versions of Outlook have been released in the past 6 years though?

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[thparker]

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

[telchine]

>No need to name call. Yeesh.

Fair enough. Not having a good day today, I din't intend for it to sound quite so offensive. I apologise.

>Anyway, they do have a little in common. If you uninstall OLE you'll kill Outlook. I've done it before, heh.

You've managed to uninstall it?! :p

>It's not that different

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. The chrome was very different and they seemed to have taken up a lot more screen real estate by default with various different viewing areas.

> at least in the sense that somebody who was used to an earlier version of Outlook wouldn't have to spend very long to adjust.

I'd argue that virtually all GUI email clients are the same if you use that criteria for measuring differences. You have your mailboxes/folders on the left and your message on the right, it doesn't take much to adjust from one to the other.

Outlook has changed considerably more than Express has in the same time period, in my opinion.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[fhic]

Eudora was always an odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

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 product, and the only Qualcomm product that a consumer ever sees for sale.

I ended up not taking the job because I didn't think they were going to keep Eudora alive. So much for my business prediction skills. Now I go to work every day at another place in the shadow of the Qualcomm development center, high on the hill above. :-)

It seems to be that this latest move will be a good thing. I use Eudora myself, but I looked seriously at Thunderbird as a replacement during one version change when they added a license agreement that I couldn't stomach. At the time, I didn't think Thunderbird was quite ready for prime time, and Eudora has since relaxed the licensing agreement to my satisfaction.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[telchine]

>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.

Correct. However, that's not at all relevant to the issue being discussed.

The poster was trying to argue a point about Outlook, by usining Outlook Express as an example.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

> No need to name call

Sounded like fair comment to me...

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[poot_rootbeer]

I only hope that they don't break Eudora in the process of changing it!

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.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

The saying is "once in a while."

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Ucklak]

Outlook AND Outlook Express currently has shitty support for IMAP servers.

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.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[thparker]

The poster was trying to argue a point about Outlook, by usining Outlook Express as an example.

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.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[cyberchondriac]

I use a client called (oddly enough) The Bat!.

It's not bad at all, very powerful, but a bit obtuse at times.
Now that Thunderbird has an extension to switch between plain text and HTML with the click of a button (or rather, now that I recently learned about that) I might switch over to Tbird.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[AmberBlackCat]

If you're going to take that point of view then why is this news? Thunderbird already exists.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"You've managed to uninstall it?! :p"

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 screen for a moment, realized that it was actually the same, I just needed to click on Mail to get started. From there, I've had no trouble adapting to it. Although I've just read further in your post.. I think we're in agreement about that. I just wanted to chime in because the UI changes in Outlook were nowhere near as troublesome as say Photoshop or Opera over the years. It looked different at first but essentially it's the same.

"Outlook has changed considerably more than Express has in the same time period, in my opinion."

Agreed. OLE has definitely stagnated. Although... I cannot say OL2K3 is really showing much improvement either. Heh. I still wonder if Microsoft just changed the color scheme so ppl'd see the screenshots and think they need to upgrade.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first heard about this move I went "uh-oh".

so did I. Thunderbird is what I use at work, versus Eudora at home since 1996 (when I ran it on my Amiga via a Shapeshifter Mac) and it does *everything* wrong.

When I reply, it puts the text of the initial message in an attachment. Useless... how do I edit that down to what I'm addressing?

When I forward, it puts the text of the initial message.... in an attachment. And worse, it blows away inline images, if any. All gone. For the life of me I can't find out how to retain the inline images. Wrong.

I hope they at least fix all that, or make it easy for users to find and fix it in preferences.
I despise it.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

That feature goes by the name "format=flowed" and is a standard, and a good one, I might add, especially if you get emails from many people who don't know about the older standard (lines are 78 chars wide, new lines don't exceed 65 chars, to leave room for quote marks).

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[thparker]

If you're going to take that point of view then why is this news? Thunderbird already exists.

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 /. and is not comprised of your typical end users -- a popular mail client going way back in Internet history is changing its codebase and going open source? Yeah, of course that's news.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't call changing the widgets from a gray to a blue backgroun a "considerable" change...

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[jrp2]

"The Oulook Outlook Express UI has been more or less the same for years."

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 revolutionary in many ways.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Hangin10]

Until I clicked comments and saw the parent post, I could not remember what Eudora is (I created both the discussion and story tabs in the background). Someone should mod up the parent as informative, since, unlike the Slashdot summary of the story, it says what Eudora is. The writer of the /. story should have added ", the mail client," to the beginning so that I can know whether I care or not before opening the actual news article.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Frosty Piss]

The poster was trying to argue a point about Outlook, by usining Outlook Express as an example.

No, the poster was not. Re-read it.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

I believe there's one of those hidden prefs to turn that off.. (that's one of my major beefs with GUI mail programs too.)

For me, Eudora never has done well with IMAP servers (e.g. maybe this has changed, but for a long time, you had to bring up a menu on each message you wanted to leave on the server.. that should be the default with IMAP though!)

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[kchrist]

You're talking about format=flowed quoting as opposed to inserting line breaks. It has nothing to do with HTML. It's also arguably the right way to quote text. And it's a standard.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[sjs132]

late to the party, I know...

I've used Eudora since PSU freshman year in 1990... We ran it on Windows 3.1 for our POP Mail... AND, I still use it today. I love it and wouldn't trade it... I've tried others, but keep coming back. there was a brief period where I'd use the Netscape email (vr. 4 or something long ago..) and ALSO Eudora...

Actually, I can still look in my email (DRIVE) folder, and I have all my emails back to 1992 when I started keeping them... CYA... Learned fast!. and I just Archive it to a DVD every-once-in-a-while so that I will never loose them.. don't know why... but I still keep EVERY email I send/recieve.. Helps at work when I get a: "I don't know what you mean, I never got that email 3 months ago... (me: Right, whats THIS!?!) Oh... That one?" :)

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[Eil]

Back in the days when dial-up Internet began taking off, Qualcommm actually shipped quite a lot of Internet connectivity software, though mainly to ISPs to give away to their customers (often rebranded). At that time, the popular desktop OSes (Mac OS and Windows 3.x) didn't have much in the way of Internet connectivity. My first dial-up Internet account was accompanied by a disk of Qualcomm software containing Eudora, a Mosaic-derived web browser, and a TCP/IP stack for Win 3.1. Of course the quality of the latter two was horrible and I ended up replacing them with Netscape and Winsock after only a few months. Seems Eudora was the only thing to survive those times.

Re:An odd thing in Qualcomm's portfolio

[poot_rootbeer]

You're talking about format=flowed quoting as opposed to inserting line breaks. It has nothing to do with HTML.

Eudora's implementation of it does, as you'll see if you "View Source" in Eudora with a message containing quoted text. (As you'll see from the mere fact that there's an option to "View Source" on an allegedly plaintext message.)

Format=flowed may be a standard, but it's one that the RFCs say mail agents MAY implement, not that they MUST implement. Eudora should have made it a user-configurable option.

Good!

[RedOregon]

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.

Re:Good!

[viniosity]

I liked Eudora's *Mac* version back in the OS9 days. The trouble with Thunderbird and all current clients I can think of is that they put the entire client in one window: folders, preview pane, email list, etc.

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 important than any large improvements of usability. It's too bad really.

I hope Qualcomm the best with their plan, but I wish they had just open sourced the code to their own client rather than building on Thunderbird.

Re:Good!

[drinkypoo]

The trouble with Thunderbird and all current clients I can think of is that they put the entire client in one window: folders, preview pane, email list, etc.

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 drawing it there (even hidden) any more.

Also, the address book is and always has been a separate window, even since the netscape days.

I know it's not quite the same level of configuration, but it's a lot more flexible than you imagine.

Re:Good!

[AVryhof]

Wouldn't it be easier just to hit F8? or go to View -> Lyout -> Message Pane?

Re:Good!

[Gilmoure]

That's what I liked about Eudora/Mac as well. Being able to start it up, have my regular mail boxes all open up in different windows, and having just a small floating tool palette was great. Even though I've used Apple Mail and Outlook for the past few years, really don't like single pane apps. Hope they keep the old Eudora look in the OS version.

Re:Good!

[arivanov]

This is not the same. One of the biggest T-bird annoyances is its insistence on 3(2) pane view.

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 prefiltered on the mail server.

Re:Good!

[colfer]

I'm heavy Eudora user and have over a decade of archived mailboxes. It has always used the unix-mail style text format for mailboxes, with attachments saved separately. (I guess we all know Outlook stores everything in one horrible PST file.)

But... Eudora had terrible problems corrupting mailboxes all through the late 1990's and early 2000's. They finally got it fixed about four years ago. I'd search for an email I knew was there, I could grep it, but it was gone from the message list. Looking at the text file, I'd see the delimiting blank line between messages got crushed. It took them a long time to fix that. Handling nonprintable characters and line endings correctly seems to have been the problem. I think they even let ASCII 26 (x1A) into the files, which acts as an EOF in many Windows/DOS text formats.

As for MIME/HTML, at least in Windows, Eudora handles it two ways. You can choose to use "Microsoft's Viewer" (default) or Eudora's rendering, which has had bugs but now seems stable.

Overall, Eudora has not been as perfect as described here, but much better and safer than Outlook. And right now, it is stable. The almost-current 7.0.1.0 version lasted over a year, I believe. In any case, the release schedule has been slow lately.

You can read about "Eudora Rescue" here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Issues_:_I mport_From_Eudora#Importing_Eudora_Mail_with_Eudor a_Rescue
and here:
http://qwerky.50webs.com/eudorarescue/
I haven't used it since I didn't hear about it until after I stopped seeing ASCII 26's, etc.

Re:Good!

[colfer]

Oh and it still has few stability bugs. It can hang when the network connection (dialup especially) is down at the wrong time, near but not at startup, and this requires Task Manager to kill it. Also, when using one Eudora.exe program directory, and multiple data directories, which is a great feature, you have to be sure to pause a few seconds between startups of the distinct desktop shortcuts, and not to re-index or search them at the same time. Those thread bugs used to be worse.

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eudora didn't become adware. Eudora was never free. Eudora light was and is free without ads. You can also buy Eudora without ads as was always the case.

An adware option was added but it's a new mode. It didn't change the existing modes, Eudora light and Eudora commercial, it just complemented them. If you couldn't afford Eudora and wanted more then Eudora light it was a good option. If you didn't like the idea of ads, well then you'd have to look somewhere else but this was always the case...

I was just looking at upgrading Eudora...

[waif69]

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

People still use Eudora?

[Frosty Piss]

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

Re:People still use Eudora?

[andersvirtualsolutio]

Ha - i'm still longing for pmmail for OS/2 :P Those were the days! Anders

Re:People still use Eudora?

[niola]

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.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi:

I've been using Eudora since 1986 or 87 or so on my Macintosh. I've stuck with it thick and thin. Apple Mail seems a bit under-powered by comparison. Granted, Eudora doesn't look like as snazzy, but it is infinitely customizable and incredibly easy to back-up and whatnot.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[gelia]

eudora filtering and rapidity in creating filters is still the best for me
regards
g.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly! I used to use Eudora on my Macintosh back around 1990. At the time it was about the only thing I could find that could handle multiple accounts and had good filtering tools. I used it religiously until somewhere around 2000 when most of the mail I cared about was no longer available through POP/IMAP (had a college email account that was only accessable through a shell login, and a work account only readable through a web interface)... More recently, I don't really use a mail client at all - most everything I read comes through a web interface (Gmail and OWA). I am vaguely surprised to hear that Eudora is still around... I never would have expected a simple (but good!) email client to have that kind of longevity, especially in the face of Microsoft's offerings.

The move to OSS is good to hear... I may have to give it a try again, just to see what it's like today... But I'm not sure I'm happy about the incorporation of the Thunderbird codebase. I've tried Thunderbird repeatedly over the last few years and have never been terribly impressed with it. Then again, maybe it's time for me to see what Thunderbird is like today too...

Re:People still use Eudora?

[hoggoth]

I also use Eudora (I paid for it).
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.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're so cool and aloof.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[dtgriscom]

I've used Eudora for thirteen years straight. I've got 32,000 emails in about a hundred folders, and it takes 2 1/2 seconds to search all of them (OS X 10.4, dual 1GHz G4). Filters are very useful, and the UI works well for me. I've considered Thunderbird, but each time I try it I find a personal showstopper and retreat back to Eudora. Everyone I support (wife, parents) I've got using Eudora. It's a nice, clean, focused product.

But! it's annoying having all my attachments dumped into a single folder, filters aren't all that flexible, and it's been years since a significant upgrade. I hope that making it open-source can give the product some new life. Worse comes to worse, it should keep Eudora from croaking before Thunderbird gets to the point where I can switch.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[rvw]

I've used Eudora for several years on my Mac, but since about two years I use Mail. My parents do use it still, and don't want to change. I've tried to move them to Thunderbird, but my mother didn't like the buttons (the pictures!). So I had to remove it. Whether this development is good news remains to be seen...

Re:People still use Eudora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

So, why do you want attachments in a separate directory?

I'm curious, because I think I might have a way for Thunderbird to do what you want it to.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

It was one of only a few clients early on that supported multiple email accounts,

How well, compared to what Thunderbird does now?

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.

This is why I currently store all my email on a Linux IMAP server, in Maildir format. My settings may have to be moved, but then, the important ones happen on the server -- like filtering, for instance. And my mail stays synced that way between my Powerbook and Linux machine.

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.

Perhaps. I still use server-side filters, and with good reason, I think.

Hopefully both Eudora and Thunderbird benefit from this.

Here we agree. In fact, I'd much rather not have to choose, if there's simply one, better choice.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[jazman_777]

But! it's annoying having all my attachments dumped into a single folder,

I've gotten in the habit of changing the attachments folder the beginning of every year. I add a new directory (say, Attach-2006) and change the setting to that folder. It starts putting attachments from there on out in that folder. So I've got things separated by years, and the old ones still work fine, because Eurdora only uses that setting in placing the attachment, not in reading / opening it.

I really don't like the "Embedded" folder...

Re:People still use Eudora?

[hoggoth]

> So, why do you want attachments in a separate directory?
> I'm curious, because I think I might have a way for Thunderbird to do what you want it to

Because my mailboxes, all totalled, are about 50MB. Eudora is a little slow sorting, searching, etc through mailboxes with several thousand messages in them. My attachments folder is, all totalled, about 300MB. If this 300MB was embedded inline in my emails, uuencoded or base-64 encoded, as they were when they originally arrived, manipulating my mailboxes would be 5 times slower.
Also, I can archive my collection of documents, including my email, onto a single 650MB CD, without the attachments. The attachments get archived less frequently on their own CD. If they were embedded in the mails I couldn't do this.

So what's your idea to change Thunderbird to automatically extract attachments when mail arrives, save it in a separate folder, and present it as part of the email when viewing?

Re:People still use Eudora?

[settrans]

In fact, until this year, Eudora was the only officially supported fat email client by Cornell Information Technologies. Only as of fall 2006 do they support Thunderbird.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[shlashdot]

Do tell.

Putting attachments in an assigned directory allows some neat functionality, like receivng xml files which are automatically placed where a script can find them for processing. Plus it's just nicer for ordinary use knowing where attachments are.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Also, I can archive my collection of documents, including my email, onto a single 650MB CD, without the attachments. The attachments get archived less frequently on their own CD. If they were embedded in the mails I couldn't do this.

In your case, I'd suggest a simple solution -- buy a DVD burner. You could even reuse the same disc 3 or 4 times, by making it multisession. I'd also suggest incremental backups -- you could backup your everyday changes onto far less than a CD, and much less frequently, you could do a full backup onto a DVD, or a pair of CDs.

So what's your idea to change Thunderbird to automatically extract attachments when mail arrives, save it in a separate folder, and present it as part of the email when viewing?

I don't have such an idea, and I don't think it's necessarily a good idea, which is why I asked what your specific needs were.

Eudora is a little slow sorting, searching, etc through mailboxes with several thousand messages in them.

My solution would be to use IMAP. In fact, I'd like to see Thunderbird using IMAP locally anyway, but in my case, I store all my mail on an IMAP server in the next room, which has the nice side effect of making it available to my laptop. Now, IMAP abstracts away things like searching through mail, and accessing a single message. My IMAP server stores the mail in maildir format, which means it takes exactly as much time to manipulate 50 megs of emails as it does to manipulate 500 megs, assuming it's the same number of messages. As for searching/sorting, my IMAP server doesn't do it properly, but IMAP does have an abstraction for searching, and I believe there's even some sort of protocol in place for creating sorting rules.

Thus, it should be possible to create a GUI in Thunderbird to implement server-side sorting rules, which is more efficient anyway if your ISP lets you do IMAP, or if you run your own server. It should also be possible to modify an IMAP server to do indexed searching, the way an actual search engine would -- Spotlight doesn't seem to have much of a problem searching most of my hard disk, so IMAP should be able to handle it fairly well, if the server keeps an index. Unfortunately, I don't know of any IMAP server that keeps a full-text index, but that's where I'd implement the functionality.

Bonus side-effect: This is no longer limited to Thunderbird. You could keep using the old Eudora, even, if it's a decent IMAP client.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[hoggoth]

Well, there's the real answer. I should start using IMAP instead of POP. That gets me other benefits like reading my mail from my laptop as well (now I use remote desktop to the desktop to read my mail from my laptop).

Do you, or anyone, know of an IMAP server that can pop mail down from an ISP?

Re:People still use Eudora?

[ender-]

Do you, or anyone, know of an IMAP server that can pop mail down from an ISP?

Well I used to do something like this. I used Courier-IMAP for the IMAP server, since it uses Maildir by default. Then I used fetchmail to pull the mail from the ISP's pop server, and drop it into the Maildir folders [via procmail].

Obviously not a 1 program simple solution, but it got the job done spectacularly.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[Erik_]

Been using Eudora for 11 Years, and still happy with it. The flat file format allows me to take the folders directly to a Linux system and plug them into Evolution without a problem.

Still using an older version (5.2), as I don't feel the need to keep up to date with the latest versions for good software that works.

As for the Embedded folder, I renamed it, and created an empty text file named "Embedded' and so Eudora can't put it's files under that structure. Works for me :-)

Re:People still use Eudora?

[HSpirit]

Fetchmail is excellent at POPing mail and then delivering it to a SMTP daemon or local delivery agent. You'll still need to install an IMAP server locally, but fetchmail provides the necessary bridge.

Re:People still use Eudora?

[metamatic]

Bonus side-effect: This is no longer limited to Thunderbird. You could keep using the old Eudora, even, if it's a decent IMAP client.

It isn't, which is why I ditched it.

A zillion years in Internet time

[Anonymous Coward]

...which is how long Eudora has been with us. Interesting to see Qualcomm bail, but not surprising. Oh yeah frist psot too :-P

Raise your hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if you just had a flashback to working in ISP tech support ten years ago, helping some senior citizen "get their Endora working"...

...oh God I'm old...

Re:Raise your hand...

[generationxyu]

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...

[ggalvao]

Uber radical Linux fanatics will kill you for flaming on PINE!

Re:Raise your hand...

[__aaclcg7560]

Don't diss Pine... That was my first email client when I got on the Internet in 1995 using a 2400 baud modem and a slip connection to get into the shell account. I still use Pine for the admin emails on my Linux servers at home.

Re:Raise your hand...

[Kelson]

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...

[Osiris Ani]

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.

Re:Raise your hand...

[Custard]

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

Dan

Re:Raise your hand...

[FictionPimp]

You can not complain. Our college only supports IPLANET web based mail. It can't filter messages to folders. It can not search all folders (you must search on folder at a time). And it is very slow, with really weird dialog options (to attach a file you have to click attach, browse, ok, add then attach.) It sucks, and we are not allowed to use any clients but this web based PoS

Re:Raise your hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally I think Linus Torvalds is crazy to still use Pine...

Re:Raise your hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, yeah. Slick kids with your "thunderbirds". I can open pine, read my mail and close it again in the time it takes thunderbird to start, using a lot less memory too. And it works just the same (and just as fast) over putty as locally. Try x-forwarding thunderbird on a modem and then complain about pine...

(I'm 25, why does pine make me talk like a 70 year old?)

Re:Raise your hand...

[sho-gun]

/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...

[generationxyu]

Pine is the worst console mail client ever.

Mutt FTW.

Re:Raise your hand...

[SlackGirl]

Oh, hell yeah.

This is a great thing

[glomph]

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.

Re:This is a great thing

[JRock911]

I agree... I used Eudora for years.. some of my friends still use it.

I've toyed with going back to it several times but I have so much mail in other mailbox formats that I just can't pull the trigger. It will be interesting to see what Eudora's development team comes up with to seperate it from Thunderbird.

Re:This is a great thing

[glomph]

Same here, I use pine, it fits my simplistic view of the world. But the PowerPoint jockeys who populate the business world go catatonic at something like that. If I can keep one or two of them away from that pile of yak-barf called Outlook, I'm happy.

Qualcomm wants an excuse to dump it

[jifl]

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.

Re:Qualcomm wants an excuse to dump it

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea about the coding of this, but their FAQ says a LOT more than their press release (suprise, suprise).

Why is Eudora moving to an open source development platform?
QUALCOMM has decided not to remain in the email market because it is not in alignment with the core business or strategic goals. By moving Eudora to an open source product, QUALCOMM can exit the Eudora business while still supporting Eudora users and advancing the Eudora e-mail client at a faster pace than before, through the power of the open source development community.

Yes, they are dumping it, but not without an "exit strategy" to keep the strong fanbase of users with something. How well things actually merge, we'll see in "first half of calendar year 2007."

Good deal

[JoeLinux]

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...

Re:Good deal

[Bert64]

You couldn't play quake2 on linux? I played all 4 versions of quake on linux...

hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Bert64]

I've had situations where i couldn't see new email, but they usually revolved around the sorting... I have mail sorted by date, but thunderbird sorts it by the date in the mail header (and thus controlled by the sender)... If the sender's clock is wrong, then mail will appear in the wrong place in thunderbird's list.

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.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[NSIM]

Strange, I've been using TBird as my primary e-mail client at work and home for almost two years now. I've never had a problem with lost mail, index corruption or anything else for that matter. I would have to suspect that the end-user is doing something out of the ordinary for this to occur with such frequency.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[ElleyKitten]

Strange, I've been using thunderbird since it was at version .3, on several different computers, using both Linux and Windows, and I've never seen those problems. Ok, sometimes I can't find my new mail, but clicking View: Unread always shows it (same thing that sibling post mentioned). Hey, did you ever suggest your clients try View: Unread before trying to rebuild their mailboxes?

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[emilv]

I think this one goes as "housekeeping the developers expect the users to do".

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[moco]

Were i work we switched to thunderbird as the official client since version 1.0. I would have heard of any complaints since we have it installed on 300 machines for 400 users. We use imap instead of pop, probably this is why.

When we switched (from O&OE to Thunderbird 1.0) we had lots of complaints caused by the differences in the two clients, but no lost email yet. What really helped us win the users was the "junk mail" feature. Now everybody is using it, manage their external contacts in it, create their vcards and signatures, etc.

Overall, switching from Outlook and OE to Thunderbird was a great decision.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[mrjackson2000]

no, what he's talking about is a simple view sorting problem and incorectly set time on the server or sending computer, i have this problem with payment notifications from verizon, always at the bottom of the list sorted by date (newest at top) and thus you don't see it when clicking on the folder.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[hitmark]

strangely, i have never seen problems like that with my use of thunderbird.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[mspohr]

I call shenanigans...

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...

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[goates]

So because it never happened to you, it never happens? Thunderbird just lost all my email a couple of days ago. Go in one day and I can see everything and all seems fine. Open it the next day and it starts up the new account wizard. After closing that (and being somewhat confused as to why it even opened in the first place) I find that all of the accounts I set up are gone and all of the emails that were there the day before missing too.

This has also happened to a friend of mine when he was trying Thunderbird to replace Outlook. He's gone back to Outlook for now as it at least hasn't lost anything yet.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[zulux]

Your email is still on the hard-drive. Your profile got messed up, the the flat files that have all the email is there. You need to find someone who can reattach it to the profile - but it's there.

Make a copy of the whole profile before you go trying to fix it though.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[lawpoop]

"So because it never happened to you, it never happens?"

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.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that your Thunderbird experience is atypical, or at least no longer applicable.

I am a system administrator for a small business, exclusively using Thunderbird as our IMAP client. We have about 50 desktops, running all various operating systems, including all flavors of Windows (98/2K/XP Home & Pro) and a handful of Debian and Ubuntu desktops.

We've found Thunderbird 1.5 to be rock solid and very reliable. The only real problem we've had is occasional crashing on one (yes, only one) Windows computer, which is, in my opinion, an absolutely stellar track record.

To summarize, I've used Thunderbird extensively on a variety of platforms and encountered none of the "housekeeping" problems that you mention. Perhaps your server(s) were out of wack?

- Dave

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[goates]

Thanks, I'll look into that.

This isn't the first time I've had trouble with Thunderbird though. It seems every time I try to use it, something doesn't work. Last time it wouldn't remember my SMTP settings and a few other things. This time my profile appears to be corrupted. Maybe one of these days I'll ditch Outlook completely, but not yet.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[ElleyKitten]

I think this one goes as "housekeeping the developers expect the users to do".

So do you think that sorting your own email is unreasonable "housekeeping"? What, do you want the developers to come to your house and sort it for you?

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

Might want to consider getting a new set of virus defs and scanning for bad stuff. Same thing for the adware/misc. crap, *especially* if weird things happen on a regular basis.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Chuckled into a full lol. Thats not a troll, thats *funny*!!!

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[gumpish]

Wow... are you serious?

Have you worked with Eudora or supported people who did for any length of time?

"The table of contents file has been corrupted and must be rebuilt..."

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." -- actual Eudora error message...

Thunderbird might not be perfect (though I haven't had ANY data loss or hiccoughs like you describe since I migrated when 1.5 was released), but Eudora is NOT the standard of stability.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[koreth]

The only significant reliability complaint I have with Thunderbird is that on OSX, once or twice a day it decides to start chewing 100% of my CPU time until I quit and restart it. Nothing actually stops working, it just starts chewing CPU. Might be something to do with the fact that I have it set to talk to multiple IMAP servers, but I don't see that behavior on Windows with the same mail servers.

I admit I haven't filed a bug report on this, mostly because I can't figure out how to reproduce it. It just seems to happen when it feels like happening, which is not exactly the makings of a useful bug report. :(

As reliability complaints go, this is a pretty minor one; the software is still perfectly functional even when the bug hits, and I can finish what I'm doing and restart it at my convenience. But it's still kind of annoying.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[cobar]

I've seen the exact same problem on Linux. Also with multiple IMAP servers. All of a sudden the machine seems to chug along and Thunderbird is sucking up cpu cycles. Oddly enough Thunderbird still works even though the cpu is pegged.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Petrushka]

It's not isolated: I've had that problem a few times too, and I think it's a result of importing mail from other clients, or perhaps just some other clients (maybe OE import is ok, but I've also imported from Pegasus, Eudora, and Opera). Mind you I've had the same problem with other clients, so it's not just Tbird.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[NSIM]

My initial installations involved importing mail from OE, and I give TBird a pretty good work out with POP, IMAP, NNTP and RSS used in each install and apart from the occasional hang checking RSS feeds I've never had a problem with it.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[cptnapalm]

Glad somebody thought so :)

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[metamatic]

And I too would like to see GPG there by default, encouraging users to use it.

S/MIME is there by default, why not use that? Then your signatures instantly work with Lotus Notes, Apple Mail, and Outlook, no plugins or extras required.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but with Eudora, when the TOC is corrupted, ya just delete it, restart Eudora, and let it rebuild the TOC... With all of your emails still safely nestled in their little .mbx flat-text files...

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Thunderbird for about 2 years now, and the only reasons I don't switch back to OE are laziness and OE's terrible security history. While using Thunderbird, I've lost all saved email on one system (from a corrupt index or something) and large portions of my email on another. On top of that, I regularly had folders with one unread message even when the folders were completely empty, although since the latest version I don't think I've experienced that.

It's exceedingly slow in most of its operations. Moving a few hundred messages from one folder to another can take 5-10 seconds. That is, as long as the folder allows you to move messages, and doesn't tell you that the folder is already in use.

Additionally, I encounter a multitude of incredibly minor bugs not worth mentioning, but are irritating to put up with and don't display a very 'professional' image of Thunderbird.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Allador]

Never had it crash? Thats pretty impressive, and quite unusual in my experience.

Last time I tried Thunderbird (a year ago or so), these are the things I could do to cause it to consistently lock up, where I had to kill it with task manager.

1. Come out of standby.
2. Come out of hibernate.
3. Change from wired to wireless.
4. Change from wireless to wired.
5. Active my VPN.
6. Drop by VPN.
7. Let it run for more than ~12 hours.

Basically it seemed that it is designed to be completely unable to change networks while live. If you change networks while its running, it gets confused.

Now grant you, it did encryption _fabulously_. But it was quite poor at actually running without failing.

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[Eil]

Whole-heartedly agree. The problems mainly seem to be centered around POP, though. I have to suspect that hardly any Thunderbird developers actually use POP. I use Thunderbird with IMAP at home and at work daily, but our POP customers have nothing but troubles with it. After having to go out and do tech support on almost every single installation, we stopped started recommending Thunderbird altogether because most of our customers already had Outlook and liked it better anyway. Not to say that Outlook doesn't have its fair share of idiocy, but Thunderbird is a nightmare to support.

Is there any other decent free email client for Windows? Is the current version of Eudora worthwhile?

Re:hopefully this will stabilize thunderbird

[mspohr]

Again, my experience is completely different which leads me to believe that possibly your computer had underlying issues.

I use standby and hibernate every day... no problem.

I change from wired to wireless frequently... no problem.

(Don't use a VPN so no experience here.)

I run it all of the time (days at a time)... no problem.

Things not in TFA:

[Kartoffel]

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: "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 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

[esconsult1]

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.

Re:This is good news

[Anonymous Coward]

Mail.app runs rings around thunderbird. Thunderbird is clunky and feels like an alpha to me. By default it starts writing below the email you're replying to, it asks you if you want to send emails in html or plain text and has no decent signature system. To spend a half hour getting a mail client ready to use is just unacceptable to me. That's a half hour I could've been working.

PS: If you're looking for a way in mail.app to sort by read status, push the field header above the read status.

Re:This is good news

[Petrushka]

Agreed. When I was using OS X a year ago I too used Thunderbird, the main reason being that Mail.app just didn't do threading properly -- at the time, anyway.

Re:Hurray?

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Makes perfect sense though

[BeeBeard]

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

[drinkypoo]

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 cheap way to buy some goodwill towards qualcomm, and Eudora is dying out anyway. In a world with Evolution and Thunderbird, who needs Eudora? Certainly, there's no reason to pay for it, or use an ad-supported program.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[MsGeek]

The reason why I *hate* Thunderbird is the same reason why I never used Netscape/Mozilla to get my mail. I DON'T want my email proggie to display MIME mail correctly. I don't want it to show HTML, I don't want it to load pictures, I don't want any of that crap. The reason why Eudora rocked so hard was the fact that it didn't display all that crap. When email viruses started showing up it gave me a security advantage in that Eudora could be directed to IGNORE all that. Thunderbird won't just display the plain text of a message. It INSISTS on giving me all the MIME bells and whistles. And that's why I use mail.app on the Mac OS X side and KMail on the Linux side.

I love Firefox. It's my browser of choice. If only I could convince my University to install it universally all over campus, I could leave IE as a historical relic like it should be. However I can't do that with T-Bird, for this reason.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[Leto-II]

View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text

Enjoy.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[Belgand]

That's exactly what I do most of the time because I personally find the idea of HTML e-mail to be abhorrant. The problem is that there are a small minority of e-mails that are almost completely broken unless they're in HTML. Thunderbird doesn't currently offer the option to set viewing preferences in the address book. It wisely allow you to specify that outgoing mail should be plain text for certain addresses, but doesn't do the reverse.

It also is incapable of allowing different viewing settings for different accounts. This is only really an issue if I want to be viewing RSS feeds through it or such and thus want them to come out in HTML, but want my e-mail to be in plain text.

Overall I find this to be an interesting change of events since I was a Eudora user for many, many years. Had to be considering that Eudora was more or less the e-mail standard on Windows before Outlook/Outlook Express came along. A while back I switched over to Thunderbird and have never looked back. Now, it seems, they've finally caught up with me.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[MsGeek]

Yes, Leto, but tell me where the FUCK the preference is so I can turn it off 100% of the time and click a button to load images when I want to, like I can in Kmail and mail.app and GMail. And like I always could in Eudora. I suspect when Eudora changes to a T-Bird code base it will be different.

It's not obvious how to do this, at least not in the versions of Mozilla and Thunderbird I've used. It should be an obvious choice.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[Bombula]

Well I hope they toss out Thunderbird's word processing and replace it with Eudora's. Ack, I have lost count of how many bug reports I've submitted about the crapiness of Thunderbird's text editor. Sheesh. I don't use Outlook because of the virus/worm issue, but it's sure got Thunderbird's ass kicked for text editing quality.

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[mgblst]

No, thunderbird is a piece of crap. I have had so much trouble finding even rudementary help, whereas I never had problems with Eudora.

Thunderbird first annoyed me by putting the replies to messages at the bottom - how the f**k is this a good idea. So after much searching, I found an option to change it to the top, then it kept putting the signature at the bottom - great, what a piece of sh*t.

Now, it is taking 5 minutes to store the message in the sent folder (imap online version) - I would be happy if it stored it locally, but I can't find a way to do this.

You suck thunderbird (only a little less than outlook!)

Re:Makes perfect sense though

[dylan_-]

Yes, Leto, but tell me where the FUCK the preference is so I can turn it off 100% of the time and click a button to load images when I want to

It's not included. There's an extension to do that here

Hmmm...

[Otter]

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.

Re:Hmmm...

[booch]

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.

Duh! I've seen dog shit that looks better than Lotus Notes. Easier to use too.

As a long-time Eudora user...

[Dzimas]

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.

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[Jerf]

I've shopped all around for mail clients and I've settled on Thunderbird, not because I love it, but because A: It's not bad and B: I've gotten used to its interface because I've used Netscape for mail for a long time.. But it's certainly not a powerhouse.

I would worry less about Eudora becoming a dead-end fork of Thunderbird and more about Thunderbird becoming a dead-end fork of Eudora.

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[Orig_Club_Soda]

Still using Eudora on a Mac (Since 1995!). I dont understand people's issues with the adware version. You have two other options: use the lite version, or pay money. What's there to complain about? I actually like th ad version because I was paying and paying and paying. You can even put the ad anywhere on the screen. I put in the bottom right and I never see it.

My main comnplaint about Eudora is the the Mac version is about 10 years old with no significant improvements. Without some basic improvements that would allow for better 3rd partty improvements. But its filters and mail boxes and search are way more powerful and easier to use than Apple Mail or Outlook.

I wonder what this direction means to me.

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[tetrode]

When you switch to Outlook, try NEO Pro, an addition to Outlook.

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. :-)

Mark

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[joeykiller]

If it takes longer than a second, the baby's going out with the bathwater.

Eudora's built in search is powered by technology from X1, makers of the commercial X1 Desktop Search (X1 is the basis of Yahoo's Desktop Search). X1 is closed source, and even though the press release doesn't say anything about it, I bet that the search part of Eudora 7.0 won't be open sourced. Open source or not: X1 is FAST, and it beats every other desktop search (for Windows) that I know of.

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[Orange Crush]

It doesn't have to be a dead end fork. There's no reason the two projects can't cross-pollinate useful features between each other. When Qualcomm pulls the plug entirely (which they probably will eventually) the code is still out there and could probably be re-absorbed into the mainline Thunderbird project.

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[SeaFox]

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... I can't say I was fond of the programs ad sponsored option, though...
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").

That's why I gave it up. Had a paid version of Eudora starting at version 4.2, I got annoyed at how little was done with it (especially the interface) as Qualcomm kept upping the version number and asking for an upgrade fee. Then version 6.0 came out - with all it's bugs. I used it but when the maintenence release (6.0.1) came out to squash those bugs, and Qualcomm wanted a full upgrade fee for it, I was through. I jumped to O.E. for awhile and then to Thunderbird and have been mostly happy since.

If this project comes through, I might consider changing back, at the least I think it will improve the Thunderbird codebase as well and maybe we'll just see a merging of the two if Qualcomm really is trying to abandon it.

Re:As a long-time Eudora user...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Surprising as it may seem, I was in this precise situation in the 2000/2001 period where network administrators were trying to standardize machines. I was newly hired as a department director at this firm, salaried well over US$100K. I've used Eudora since around 1994 and flat out refused to adopt Outlook. After a series of tense stare-downs, the issue unbelievably went all the way to the CEO's office.

When pressured, I simply said, "I'm not using Outlook and would rather be fired." At that point, the CEO decided that it was just fine for me to use Eudora and the network admins needed to back the truck up.

(Of course, there was all the requisite "fine but we won't support his computer" jibes, as if I really needed some other geek to touch my machine in the first place.)

True story.

developer,s developers, developers

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, in the early morning haze of the Internet, I received a free Copy of Eudora with a Qualcomm modem. I had some issues with the application and I noticed the 'About' pop-up had two names in a "developed by:" line. I had the Qualcomm HQ number and I decided to call. The first person was no longer with the company but the secretary connected me to the second person. She was suprised that I was a user fielding her a help desk question. But she knew the issue and sent me through the mail a fixed copy. You can't do that nowadays.

Funny, it was also the same year I beta tested a web browser by a company called SpyGlass...

I'll miss it

[ymos]

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.

Re:I'll miss it

[kfg]

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.

You could do that because Eudora uses the standard UNIX mail format. It's just a directory full of ASCII text, so to "import" or "export" you just copy the directory.

Thunderbird uses . . .the "Eudora" mail format, as does nearly every non Microsoft based mail app in the known universe. You can read your "Eudora" mail from a Linux console. If you're hard core you can use ed to do it.

KFG

Re:I'll miss it

[Anonymous Coward]

True, Eudora uses mbox format, however, the newlines are still system dependent, so you need to use a CR/LF converter if your switching between MacOS and Windows (or importing it into a Unix/Linux based system). But that aside, I think that its great that it uses such a common format-- if you're forced to switch mail clients, the move is generally trivial.

From what a Eudora customer service agent told me, though, you will lose your status flags if you move between MacOS and Windows versions of Eudora, so they probably don't store the statuses within the mail themselves like some clients do. (Now, I wish _that_ was a bit more standard.)

--Dave Romig, Jr.

Re:I'll miss it

[ElleyKitten]

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.

You can do that with Thunderbird, too.

Re:I'll miss it

[SD_92104]

It also doesn't work with the old version - since Eudora detaches attachments, storing them on your filesystem and having only a text link in the original message pointing to the attachment. If the attachment's file name is longer than 32 chars, this text link will use an abbreviated file name which contains the node id of the file on the file system (at least it does so on the Mac) - try moving that to a new HD/system...

Re:I'll miss it

[Petrushka]

Surely CR/LF won't be an issue? I should have thought that if it were, everyone would always have problems sending/receiving mail between *nix/Mac/Windows e-mail clients. And even if it were an issue, surely any decent app will auto-detect which to use? If a very basic text editor can do it, Eudora certainly ought to.

Looking back, looking ahead

[viewtouch]

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.

Re:Looking back, looking ahead

[mmeister]

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 code. They're just taking Thunderbird code and renaming it Eudora.

As for Thunderbird. It is generally a very disappointing product and an example of why free software sometimes amounts to getting what you pay for. The interface is horrible, doesn't conform to the standards of the OS. I haven't used it enough to question its reliability, but have read many concerns about it not being the most stable product.

This announcement was not a declaration that free software is the way to go, that was just a convenient way for Qualcomm to dump the product. Nothing more.

Re:Looking back, looking ahead

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, do I wish I had mod points today. I'm assuming this officially kills their rewrite of Eudora for Mac OS X.

Re:Looking back, looking ahead

[Blakey Rat]

Criminy, stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Some accountant at Quadcomm went to the CEO and said, "why are we spending $X a year on an email client that only nets $(X/2) in revenue?" And the CEO said, "uh... I dunno." So they dropped it.

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.

Re:Looking back, looking ahead

[syrion]

I will never understand why the best free software seems to be the ugliest, least user-friendly. Take slrn and mutt, for example. Both are excellent tools in their categories: I still use slrn to read Usenet, and would use mutt if all of my email accounts weren't locked behind web-based interfaces. Why does it seem as if you can either have power or a nice interface? They shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

A most excellent day!

[hockeyrink]

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!

Re:A most excellent day!

[Overzeetop]

Well, I dropped pay-Eudora in favor of T-bird, in hopes of losing vendor lock-in on the format and an annual software fee. To be honest, I liked eudora better, but I can get around in thunderbird. Problem is, t-bird is such a space hog - the last time I looked I had over a gig and a half of storage in my directory, and that was just from the last 14-18 months. If eudora turns out to be a viable oss project and the future is truly bright, I'll probably switch back. Imho, this looks like a graceful EOL for Eudora as a qualcomm supported product. Hopefully theres a satble base of users that will maintain it at a high level. (I'm not a programmer - i can guarantee you wouldn't want me writing code!)

Re:A most excellent day!

[Gilmoure]

I have 6 years worth of Eudora email and it's just over 500MB. 'Course, this is from '93-'99 and attachments were few and far between.

Re:A most excellent day!

[Petrushka]

Well, I dropped pay-Eudora in favor of T-bird, in hopes of losing vendor lock-in on the format and an annual software fee. To be honest, I liked eudora better, but I can get around in thunderbird. Problem is, t-bird is such a space hog -

Eudora and Thunderbird both use precisely the same storage format, viz. mbox, so I'm afraid the first of your reasons for switching to Tbird wasn't a terribly good one. Given this, I'd also suspect that the reason for why your e-mail is taking up so much space is not caused specifically by the change of e-mail client. I'd suggest either (1) you're getting much more e-mail these days; or else (2) you've never done "File - Compact Folders". (Tbird should normally remind you to do that; perhaps it hasn't. Still, it does require more user maintenance, as others in this discussion have pointed out.)

Thunderbird's better

[lymond01]

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.

Re:Thunderbird's better

[niola]

There was a time when Eudora was the email client in Mosaic Communicator suite ;)

Man time sure flies.

Re:Thunderbird's better

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too![/aol]

I've been using Thunderbird since v0.3 or so, and I just won't use Eudora. I'm an e-mail admin, and we officially deploy Eudora to our users as requested, but I find it an unusable UI. The toolbars have icons that are not extremely intuitive, and there is no option to show text. (Only having tooltips is lousy - it leads to a lot of 'scrubbing.) Thunderbird 'just works.' The only feature that Eudora has that Thunderbird doesn't is mail merge, which I know a very select few use. I don't know if this new client will/set of features will have it, or if someone will end up writing an extension to do it (maybe one exists?). The only real reason we have for deploying Eudora is that we bought a bunch of licenses awhile ago. :P Also, the good old 'there's no support' argument.

Re:Thunderbird's better

[feranick]

You can get multiple signatures with "signature switch", a free extension for Thunderbird: https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/611/

I still use Eudora for its portability...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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:I still use Eudora for its portability...

[Coneasfast]

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.

Just an FYI, it can definitely do that now.

Re:I still use Eudora for its portability...

[akahige]

Eudora's kind of unique in that you don't actually have to INSTALL it. If you have it backed up to CD (or whatever) all you have to do is drag it where you want it and run it. It will recreate whatever registry entries it needs. The only thing you have to do is make sure that the data path listed in eudora.ini is correct.

Re:I still use Eudora for its portability...

[MBGMorden]

Don't even need to do that (at least last time I used Eudora). You can hand it a command line option stating it's data directory and that overrides anything in the .ini.

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).

Re:I still use Eudora for its portability...

[KnightMB]

"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."

Huh? I use the search all the time and sort by date? Click the "Date" Column and that should take care of it. That's been around for a long time now in Thunderbird, but hopefully this information will help :-)

Re:I still use Eudora for its portability...

[AnyoneEB]

Thunderbird does not touch the registry (except for one thing...), it just uses the application data folder, which is the proper place for... application data (same with every open source app I have installed on my XP machine, I believe). The one exception is the default mail app setting, which I assume is stored in the registry, but Thunderbird does not need to run. I consider use of the registry to be a bug (or at least, an unwanted feature) in a Windows program. Someone please correct me if there actually is some reason why using the registry would be a good idea.

Re:I still use Eudora for its portability...

[TheLink]

We used to do this in the days of Novell and Win 3.x and Win 95.

Everyone got their personal folder mapped to a drive when they log in.

And the shortcut for eudora was i:\apps\eudora.exe j:\mail or something like that.

So even if users logged on to different computers they'll still get their own mail, even their own bookmarks.

As long as they didn't use MS Outlook and IE, which didn't work well with that sort of network drive thing. Even to this day, implementing roaming profiles seem to be a lot more troublesome and problematic than the above.

I wonder if there's a Knoppix Corporate Desktop, where you just network boot off the fastest server and then if you log on successfully you get to access your home directory stuff.

Re:Hurray?

[drinkypoo]

Netscape Communicator and its descendants have always used mbox files to store mail, with one or two headers added - one of them being the deletion status, and unlike traditional mbox messages are not removed until you compact folders, to reduce disk thrashing while reading email. I once wrote a simple perl script that undeleted 'em. It's pretty easy. :)

One important question

[tommasz]

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.

Re:One important question

[Randle_Revar]

Any code that went back into the tbird base would need have the standard mozilla tri-license (GPL, LGPL, MPL), so that would not affect Debian. However, Thunderbird and Seamonkey (and presumably Sunbird, Camino, etc.) have the exact same logo and trademark problems as Firefox. Just as Firefox will become IceWeasle, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey will likely become IceDove and IceApe.

Business model?

[MMC Monster]

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?

Re:Business model?

[niola]

I honestly think that Qualcomm is trying to get away from Eudora altogether. As someone else on this discussion pointed out, an email client does not really seem to fit in with their main business developing wireless equipment for telcos or developing protocols etc.

Seems this is just a graceful way of moving on and trying to avoid any ill will from current users.

Re:Business model?

[qzulla]

Where I work we have over 7k users on Eudora. One reason is it works with Entrust.

qz

Jury's out

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

[martin]

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

Re:Attachment folder

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi:

Aw man, I love Eudora's attachment folder. It's brilliant: All the crap people send you is in one place that can be sorted by date. Others have commented upon the blistering speed of Eudora searches. It has to be seen to be believed.

My personal set up is to have Spotlight ignore the Eudora folder and do all searches for mail from withing Eudora.app. This way I'm not turning up every thing on my hard drive each time I'm searching for a mail. When searching with Eudora for something, the results come up in a blink.

Of course, I also have .html e-mail stripped out.

Re:Attachment folder

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! Now I'll spend even more time splitting up >2GB mbox files for my users who use their email app like an archival system.

Re:Attachment folder

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi:

You're never going to get people to change their workflows completely; however you can get them to make their workflows the best versions of their workflows. Yes, some people use e-mail systems as their filing cabinets. A few simple admin changes like forbidding multimedia files curbs the worst of the abuses.

The hysterical insistance that e-mail clients should not ever be used as a historical chain of knowledge and storage for people is a bit silly. People remember events in context and transporting one's e-mails over years is how many people remember events. Ensuring transportability of that e-mail is one thing Eudora does brilliantly: copy the application folder from one hard drive to another and do the same with your user folder and boom--all of your e-mail and attachments are up and available, and back to making money for the company, in a heartbeat.

Who Can't Read Either?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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

Re:Who Can't Read Either?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read it Futurama based on Thunderbird

Ugh

[daeg]

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

[niola]

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

Debian renames Thunderbird as LightningPigeon

[Foofoobar]

Who can see this one coming down the pipeline?

Re:Debian renames Thunderbird as LightningPigeon

[Quiet_Desperation]

TornadoTitmouse! Yeah! (insert Howard Dean yell here)

Re:Debian renames Thunderbird as LightningPigeon

[QuasiEvil]

I was personally thinking GreesyChupacabra, as a follow-up to their pure marketing genius with "IceWeasel"

Time warp

[saboola]

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.

Re:Time warp

[Quiet_Desperation]

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.

Re:Time warp

[saboola]

From the wikipedia article about the documentary film on time travel "Back To The Future III"

Like Back to the Future Part II, Back to the Future Part III picks up at the moment where its predecessor left off. Doc Brown has been accidentally sent back to 1885 by a lightning bolt.

As you can clearly see, it can happen by accident. Maybe Back To The Future IV will be about Eudora.

Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

[Britz]

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?

Re:Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

[Shados]

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

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 some parts (especialy around the query planner/parser) is still heavily hardcoded and is a total hell to modify, parts of it are extremly slow because of legacy code, etc. While I'm sure Oracle has these issues too, it would just be trading some problems for some others, so really, I don't see Oracle switching. Either way they have to do a partial rewrite. Might as well do it on a database they know best.

I still use Outlook

[gbr]

I looked at Eudora, but didn't go for it for the same reasons I still use Windows on my laptop:

1. I must be able to sync my Pocket PC
2. Outlook syncs REALLY well with my eGroupware Server.

Gerald

I Miss Mulberry

[cmason]

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

Re:I Miss Mulberry

[Anonymous Coward]

To quote the Pythons

"I'm not dead yet!"

http://www.mulberrymail.com/

Re:I Miss Mulberry

[Scurra UK]

Wow, thanks for that link - Mulberry is a brilliant e-mail client (although it's taken me about 3 years of use to realise _just_ how good it is.)

Show me another client that lets me manipulate ACLs on IMAP and store all my preferances on a remote server and I _might_ consider switching.

Re:I Miss Mulberry

[Firehawke]

I'm an ex-Eudora, ex-Pine, and current Thunderbird/mutt (depending on OS) user, though I've never heard of Mulberry.

In a nutshell, what's so special about this client as compared to what I've used? I'm not opposed to taking a look at a new client if it's really that good.

Re:I Miss Mulberry

[Anonymous Coward]

Mulberry has what is supposedly the best, most-featureful, and most standards-compliant IMAP support. In fact it is very much a high-powered solution for server-side stuff: Mulberry supports IMSP storage of mail preferences and address books - and ACAP, I think - and the iCal standard for calendaring.

Apparently, David Harris of Pegasus Mail said that no one had implemented IMAP as well or as Cyrus Daboo. Mulberry is also highly configurable and there's every option you could imagine for layout for Windows and panes.

The downside it is it has the ugliest, fussiest, most complicated, and most unintuitive interface of any mail client on the market and probably has *too many* options. It takes ages to set it up and nothing is where you would expect to find it. Heck, you could spend ages simply re-sizing the damn windows to appropriate proportions and saving the configuration of each window - there's a menu option for that. And even long-time users forget where the setting are. It also has an extremely primitive HTML parser.

So it is an extremely capable program in some ways - able to handle remotely-held mail in vast quantities in multiple accounts with consummate ease and lightning fast search abilities. But in other ways - HTML email handling, for example - it is fairly *in*capable. And it is a powerful but not a friendly program. Whether it's a useful tool or not depends on whether it fits one's precise needs.

If they wanted to build a Outlook killer...

[haggie]

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...

Re:If they wanted to build a Outlook killer...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for the Q and a year or two back we switched calendar applications to Outlook with Exchange. I think that was the beginning of the end for Eudora. Before, both Eudora and Outlook were both installed by default on new hire machines and in the orientation session much focus was put on Eudora. Now, new employees will now use Outlook by default as it is integrated with our calendar. I myself switched from using Eudora to Outlook so I didn't have to run two clients, one for e-mail and one for calendar. Many people who work here and still use Eudora only do so because they have complicated filters they have tuned over the years and don't want to throw all that away. I don't know what they do in the orientation sessiong regarding mail clients now. For home e-mail I only have a gmail account and I am really happy with their web interface and searching ability.
J

Re:If they wanted to build a Outlook killer...

[QuasiEvil]

Ouch, that's the last thing I actually want. I hate Outlook for just this reason (among many). I don't need an electronic calendar, I don't want an electronic calendar, I don't use Outlook's godforsaken integrated features. I don't even use the address book. Somehow, though, it's still there, and it still reminds me about meetings that I either don't care about or don't plan to attend. Call me a luddite, but I still use the dead tree variety or notes scribbled on my whiteboard.

All I want a fast, efficient mail client. It should not have other crap in it, or at least I should be able to disable that crap and make it go away entirely. This is why I've stuck with Eudora all these years. I used a combination of pine and Eudora at work, until they forced me to convert by switching to Exchange servers that didn't talk POP or IMAP.

WP5.1 -- the last true master

[PMuse]

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.

Re:WP5.1 -- the last true master

[rmcd]

Were you importing mail data from Eudora? I've switched from Eudora to Thunderbird on three machines and the importing of mail and address books was flawless each time. It my not handle other clients as well, I don't know.

lol what?

[RLiegh]

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

Re:lol what?

[Aladrin]

They already explained that, if you'd RTFS. They are adding their old feature set to it.

But...

[haxor.dk]

Where Is The Money?

That's why I use Eudora!

[kerecsen]

The "dodgy attachment folder" is the single greatest feature in Eudora. It is one of the fundamental reasons why searching your emails is so fast (there is less junk to go through), and it also allows you to keep your email around for a very long time. I have all my mail for the last 8+ years sitting on my hard disk, and since it is only the mail text without attachments, I can still fit it on a CD, even uncompressed.

I was seriously contemplating switching over to Thunderbird (due to some shortcomings in how Eudora displays complex HTML emails and international characters), and the dealbreaker was that Thunderbird lacked support for storing attachments separately from mail. In fact there are features in Thunderbird that would support this sort of scheme, but nobody ever thought to do it.

I'm hoping desperately that the Qualcomm folks put this feature into Thunderbird. The search I'm not too worried about, since Google Desktop is going to beat anything they come up with anyway...

Re:That's why I use Eudora!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was seriously contemplating switching over to Thunderbird (due to some shortcomings in how Eudora displays complex HTML emails and international characters), and the dealbreaker was that Thunderbird lacked support for storing attachments separately from mail. In fact there are features in Thunderbird that would support this sort of scheme, but nobody ever thought to do it.

I believe the current version of Thunderbird has the attachment folder option. Go to Tools -> Options -> Attachments. I don't if it does what you're talking about (haven't used it myself), but it looks like it.

wtf?

[Danzigism]

I didn't even know Eudora still existed.

Re:wtf?

[Lord Flipper]

I didn't even know Eudora still existed.

That's great, clueless/ignorant, and proud. You'll make a fine American voter/consumer, someday.

Re:wtf?

[Danzigism]

well its good to hear people are using pointless email clients.. luckily i'm not ignorant enough to waste my time..

Great! I've used only those clients!

[^_^x]

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?

[__aawdrj2992]

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

Re:Debian renames Thunderbird as IceDove

[Randle_Revar]

Thunderbird will most likely become IceDove.

Maybe the other way around

[NineNine]

Call me crazy, but I see this as a bad thing. Why? Eudora has been a great product for as long as email has been around. It's the most reliable, solid client out there. Thunderbird is still flaky. I think that it's a mistake to throw out almost two decades of tried and true code just to jump on the next big thing, especially when that next big thing isn't all that great. It looks like this will be yet another case of users holding on dearly to their old versions of software because the old ones are simply better (Winamp, anyone?)

Re:Maybe the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't really know how much code they will be providing. Personally, I suspect they will be making a lot more available then they will use but who knows? I think one of the key issues here is that Qualcomm doesn't want to play much of a role in Eudora's development in the future. If they were to just opensource it, they will have to try and attract developers and a community. While this might sound easy in theory, it's not. By using Thunderbird, they have a codebase that they know will be supported. Don't forget that Eudora doesn't even have a *nux version (although I would assume it wouldn't be that hard to port the Os X version). Also, I strongly suspect Mozilla would not have been willing to support the Eudora codebase since they don't want to dilute their efforts.

While the Eudora codebase seems resonable stable as I've pointed out earlier, it's a bit dated and lacks key things like Unicode/UTF-8. Sure it would be possible to add what's missing but the fact Qualcomm hasn't done so yet suggests it's not that easy. Very likely, the code is starting to show it's age and starting 'fresh' will work a lot better...

Real men use ASCII

[Kadin2048]

Damn right they do. Seven bits should be good enough for anybody.

Most missed Eudora features

[slagish666]

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.

Too bad it's not Eudora that's being opened.

[Kadin2048]

Agreed.

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 shakes to begin with. Basically this is "we need to kill Eudora, but we don't want to piss off our users -- how can we get them to switch to Thunderbird without realizing they're switching to Thunderbird?"

Kind of a sad end for a venerable program, although better than just totally killing it, I suppose. Maybe some parts of Eudora's extant codebase will be merged with TBird's and released in the process, so it won't be a total duplicated effort.

Re:Too bad it's not Eudora that's being opened.

[NineNine]

I think that part of the problem is that among geeks, ESPECIALLY young geeks, there's little to no respect for old code. The assumption is always newer is better. The second that an update of ANYTHING is available, most people will do it. After working in the industry for a while, most people (like me) tend to learn to respect old, tried and true code, especially if it's for something important.

Long live Steve Dorner!

[BalkanBoy]

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 :).

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eudora wasn't "set free". Eudora was effectively dumped.

Sure enough, straight from the FAQ:

Why is Eudora moving to an open source development platform?
QUALCOMM has decided not to remain in the email market because it is not in alignment with the core business or strategic goals. By moving Eudora to an open source product, QUALCOMM can exit the Eudora business while still supporting Eudora users and advancing the Eudora e-mail client at a faster pace than before, through the power of the open source development community.

And to nobody's surprise, they killed the Mac OS rewrite that had been promised for a year and a half (version 7):

QUALCOMM is also announcing today the launch of the last commercial versions of Eudora, version 7.1 for Windows and version 6.2.4 for Mac.

Nice theory, but incorrect

[msobkow]

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 so badly done and unreliable that it shouldn't even be shipped.

Pffft. You wuss.

[Anonymous Coward]

Real men don't bother with that sissy ASCII stuff. Real men use EBCDIC.

Eudora never had good UTF-8 or IMAP or LDAP

[Werrismys]

Eudora version 7.x still does not have correctly working UTF-8 support. The LDAP support is hard to use, and IMAP is really flaky.

On top of that, version 7 introduced bugs that sometimes destroy mailbox indexes (that's why Eudora nowadays keeps multiple backups of everything). HTML formatted messages sometimes crash the whole thing. Its "fast indexing" sometimes hangs. The junk mail filter is abysmally bad. Sometimes perfectly fine filter rules cease to function. And so on.

It was good, cheap software, but started to show its age in late 90's.

Re:Eudora never had good UTF-8 or IMAP or LDAP

[lahi]

Just for the record, I abandoned Eudora (Mac) at version 3 or 4 or thereabouts, after an incident where the Tomcat-users mailing list, which I directed to a mailbox, passed the 32K messages mark. For some reason Eudora used signed 16 bit int as a mailbox counter, and promptly truncated the mailbox, resulting in the loss of my archive of the list. I was not amused.

I have always admired Steve Dorner for making a wonderful mail application, but that incident really disappointed me. As a result, I don't trust any mail program these days - my mail is now delived into a Maildir by Postfix and I read it using a few simple shell scripts which I wrote myself.

-Lasse

Consolidation is great!

[Tarlus]

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...

Re:Consolidation is great!

[cbuck1]

I wish other software companies had sent their retired products to open source. I'd kill for a homekey-based wordprocessor like Wordstar.

And furthermore...

[Tarlus]

If they could do that, and then develop seamless communication with an Exchange server (for both email and the calendar), then I'd throw Outlook out completely. Since everybody in my department is so used to Exchange now, they don't want to break away from it, though most of them agree that Outlook is a pretty scary thing to be dependent on.

Mod parent up

[cwgmpls]

No email client will ever compete against Outlook at the enterprise level until they combine email and calendar into one application the way Outlook does. PDA syncing is a requirement too. Unless and until Thurderbird/Eudora does those two things, 95% of email client users will keep using Outlook.

Eudora has already changed...

[kc8jhs]

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

-Mikey P

About a year ago I upgraded from Eudora 3.51 to

[the_rajah]

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.

Seven Bits???

[Snorpus]

Five bits is plenty. See the Baudot Code.

New version name

[Junior J. Junior III]

I hope they decide to call it "thEUnDeORAbird".

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

HTML and Security

[slackergod]

Regarding Thunderbird's handling of HTML & images...
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 html.

the end effect of all of this is that html in thunderbird is about as dangerous tracking/security wise
as the markup language of a slashdot post.

Eudora's so old

[Blob Pet]

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

[justthinkit]

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

[aafiske]

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.)

Re:Why companies switch out engines

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

That may be the motivation, but I, for one, am happy. I'm hoping for the best of both worlds.

Think about it: We could keep bickering about BSD vs Linux, and BSD would have some features, Linux would have others, and neither would be any good. Now, most every distro is on Linux, not BSD, and new features go into Linux. Sad if you liked BSD, but a very good thing if you don't want to have to choose between BSD recognizing your printer and Linux recognizing your scanner, or something equally stupid.

I'd rather have Eudora features rolled into Thunderbird, or vice versa, than have them keep maintaining Eudora separately. Monopolies in open source are generally a good thing, until politics get in the way.

Re:Why companies switch out engines

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to post as anonymous coward, but I can't be bothered to wait for the registration email to wind its way to me from slashdot.

> 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.

Bingo.

> It's generally an indicator that the expertise has migrated away from the company.

I'm working on it full-time, as I have been mostly since 1988. Jeff Beckley is also here, but he's a newcomer at only 1991 or so. Two more of the QC staff have pedigrees of 6 years or so, and then we have one engineer who's new to the project; but he's a thunderbird user, and we figure that's a handy thing to have on staff.

So I'd say this one was off the mark in our case.

Steve Dorner

BTW, got a kick out of the person who dug up a repost of the original announcement. Source was available back then, too...

LFN

[Kadin2048]

I have heard of an email system less convenient than Lotus Notes; it involved pneumatic tubes, and pointed sticks that you pressed into wet clay tablets.

I think its Unicode support was less buggy, though, so maybe it's a tie.

Thanks for the info

[Kadin2048]

Parent should be modded up as Informative.

On one hand, since it seems like Qualcomm has decided to kill Eudora as a project, I'm glad they're going to provide an OSS "exit strategy" for their customers, rather than just telling them to piss off and use Outlook.

However, and particularly in view of the fact that they're sending developers to work with the Thunderbird folks, I really wish that they had opened the source of Eudora itself. To me, that's the biggest promise of OSS -- that software won't just disappear when the corporation who used to maintain it decides to take their ball and go home. Unfortunately in this case, Eudora is going to do exactly that, it's going to disappear.

The "New Eudora" that they're going to produce, is just going to be a Thunderbird clone with a Eudora-like interface on it. I know a lot of people who used Eudora, and none of them did it for the interface. By going this route, they're throwing away everything that made Eudora useful.

I hope that those developers, if they don't bring a snapshot of Eudora's source itself to combine with Thunderbird, will at least bring enough of the core philosophies that drove Eudora's creation, to produce a product that's more than just "Thunderbird with a Eudora skin."

Re:Thanks for the info

[HSpirit]

As a Eudora user at our small business (3 Eudora installations), what I do hope more than anything else is that they develop a rock-solid, stable and reliable importer for Eudora mail into the new Penelope/Eudora-Thunderbird hybrid so that we can transition our mail to the new platform with confidence. If this is done well - and it must be seen as the number one priority of the developers - then I think that's half the battle won.

Intel Macs are going to be the problem.

[Kadin2048]

In the short term, I think it will mean effectively nothing, as long as you don't upgrade your computer much further. Actually it might be good if you're using the ad-supported version, because they're going to turn off the advertisements at some point in the future when they stop supporting it.

At some point -- probably with your next Mac purchase, realistically -- you're going to get a system that won't run the Classic environment, and that will be the end of Eudora for you.

At that point you'll either have to use Apple Mail, or Thunderbird's mainline branch, or the Thunderbird/Eudora ("Penelope") branch. Or one of the other email programs out there. But OS 9 Eudora will be right out.

If the thought of not being able to run OS 9 applications is as unappealing to you as it is to me, you might want to get a late-model PPC Mac while you still can, if your current one is getting long in the tooth.

The one saving grace about the whole thing is that Eudora stores its saved messages in a pretty neat way (flat files) so you shouldn't have any problems moving your messages to a new system ... it's more moving you to a new system that's the issue.

Personally, I gave up on Eudora a few years ago when it became clear that the OS X rewrite was just not going to happen in a timely fashion. I switched to Apple Mail, and while I can't say that I haven't looked back, it hasn't been a horrible experience. (I didn't make heavy use of Eudora's rules, and I upgraded my computer at the same time, so even though Mail takes longer to search messages, it doesn't seem like it.) I do think that the multiple-window interface of Eudora is superior to the single-window/multiple-pane thing that Mail has going, but giant monolithic windows seem to be in vogue now.

Eudora-Mac Runs in OS X

[Orig_Club_Soda]

I am running 10.4.8 - the latest OS X and an Intel Mac. This has nothing to do with OS 9.

Original USENET post announcing Eudora

[guanxi]

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

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

[BenoitRen]

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"

[oohshiny]

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.

Re:polite way of saying "discontinued"

[the100rabh]

Bang on target I would say...Probably some day even MS would say...heres my IE....You please merge it with Firefox...or even better...here windoze src..please merge it with Linux kernel

Unicode?

[Toddlerbob]

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.

Eudora

[peter Payne]

And between Mac and Windows. Eudora was GREAT. I would have kept it but

a) the Japanese versions were always 1.5 years behind the English versions
b) that guy Horie who got busted in Japan for insider trading in Japan made the Japanese versions, and his problems didn't bode well for the program
c) with things like the Intel switch on the Mac side, one doesn't need to be running weird fringe programs, however cool they may be

Steve Dorner is on the project team!

[Foerstner]

As the blurb says, Steve Dorner is the original developer of Eudora/Mac. This was back before 1990, when TCP/IP on the desktop was a protocol looking for a killer app. He was at University when he wrote it, has been with Qualcomm since they bought Eudora, and seems to be a reasonably nice guy. He gave away early versions to anyone willing to send him a floppy. (No, there weren't any Mac FTP clients then, either....)

He's the guy who named it after Eudora Welty, naturally.

I'm glad he's on the new "Eudora" team. His input bodes well for Eudora users who aren't just looking for Thunderbird with a new icon.

Cheap Insurance

[irqless]

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.

Who use Eudora? QCOM doesn't . Do you?

[vensub]

ahah EOM

Amen!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, absolutely right. Mailboxes sans attachments are SOOOO much nicer to work with. If you haven't had the pleasure, you don't know what you're missing.

I've used Thunderbird, and have seen the "detachment" function in 1.5+. Better than nothing, but definitely inferior to Eudora's attachment handling.

I'm thrilled with this news, because I expect the best of Eudora will survive, and bloat/crap like mood watch, supported/sponsored modes, IE viewer, etc, will perish. And maybe it will finally migrate to Linux!

A good thing

[Danathar]

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.