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

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: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.

Penelope

[niola]

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

Re:Good!

[AVryhof]

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

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."

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.

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:Makes perfect sense though

[Leto-II]

View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text

Enjoy.

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.