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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."
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!
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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.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope they decide to call it "thEUnDeORAbird".
Debian will have to come up with something else, of course.
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