Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Quietly Resurrects Eudora
Stony Stevenson writes to mention that the Mozilla Foundation has quietly released the first beta version of the revised Eudora email application. This is the first development Eudora has seen since Qualcomm stopped development and turned it over to the open source community in 2006. "Eudora first appeared in 1988 and quickly became one of the first popular email applications, enjoying its heyday in the early 1990s as it developed over the early days of the internet. Use of Eudora began to wane in the mid-1990s as the third-party application was muscled out of the market by web-based services such as Hotmail and bundled applications such as Outlook."
Linux.com has a bit more explanation about why many may not consider this simply a new release of Eudora. According to the release page the new Eudora application is not intended to compete with Thunderbird, but instead to complement it.
I used to use eudora back in the 90s. Then they incorporated the IE engine for mail rendering and a lot of their security lead over MS Lookout was lost so I moved on. But I had no idea that Qualcomm donated it to Mozilla last year. Kinda gives me pangs of nostalgia.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
When I saw this yesterday, I actually experienced a few seconds of excitement that there might someday be a good X11 mail client. But then I looked a bit further into what it is they've actually created here; functionality-wise, this mostly appears to be Thunderbird with a few of Eudora's icons pasted atop.
If you take a look at the list of bugs submitted by users, you'll notice that the vast majority of them are regarding the fact that this application behaves nothing like Eudora.
Very disappointing, I'm afraid. I hope that some day there will be X11 mail clients available that aren't simply clones of a clone of Outlook.
Why you'd want Thunderbird to behave more like Eudora, I don't know. I guess a lot of Eudora users (full disclosure: I used to use Eudora back when I had dialup and Windows 3.x) might like a version of Thunderbird that behaves like Eudora in terms of key bindings, toolbars, etc.
The question is: If Eudora/Penelope is a plugin for Thunderbird, why not make a 'Linux Eudora' as well?
My blog
They're releasing a new version of Eudora, based on Thunderbird. Many of the changes that make Eudora different from Thunderbird will be made through an extension called "Penelope". So "Eudora" will be a modified version of Thunderbird with Penelope already installed, but you can install Penelope with the normal version of Thunderbird and it should kind of work.
I think that's what they're saying, but I'm not positive.
The Penelope Addion Page has a little more information:
Penelope is the open source version of Eudora. This extension adds changes to the Thunderbird UI to provide a familiar UI for Eudora users. Many of the Eudora shortcuts are also supported including functionality not offered in Thunderbird.
Penelope is an Add-on to Thunderbird which implements some a Eudora User Interface and some Eudora features.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
First of all, Qualcomm has to date done nearly all the work on Penelope. Mozilla has certainly been helpful, but this is not a project being done by Mozilla.
Secondly, this is the initial release, intended for developers, not for end users. We're as aware as anyone that it is incomplete.
Thirdly, by "not a competitor", we mean that we intend to make all our work available to Thunderbird. It will be up to the TBird guys to choose what to integrate, of course, but in principle we think they'll take most of it, so that in the long run, the difference between the applications will be largely what they're called and what the default behaviors are.
Eudora 8 is just a customized version of Thunderbird and not a different app in any way shape or form. If you install and run it on a machine that already has Thunderbird installed, it *WILL* mess up your existing Thunderbird profile.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
> Looking at the comments in this thread, I think we can safely assume that not one
> of us really has a clue as to what is going on. I cheerfully admit I don't.
You have to know some background. Chiefly, you have to know what Eudora is. Eudora is (or was, at any rate) one of the major proprietary GUI-based mailreaders. A couple of years ago it was the second-oldest one still under development, and then the company behind it decided for whatever reason that they weren't going to maintain it any more. (FWIW, the dude behind the oldest one subsequently decided the same thing, which now leaves, if I'm not mistaken, MS Outlook as the oldest still-under-development GUI-based mailreader, which is just plain sad.)
As a fairly old and mature product, Eudora had quite a long lead on Thunderbird, in terms of functionality. Eudora wasn't Pegasus, not by a wide margin, but nonetheless Thunderbird still has a ways to go to catch up to where Eudora was five or ten years ago.
So no doubt a lot of Eudora users are not eager to move away from Eudora. (Indeed, why should they? Nothing currently under active development is better.) But the old Eudora codebase contains proprietary components, so even though Qualcomm is willing to release what they can do the open-source community, they can't really release a working codebase that can be easily turned into a working Eudora. Even when an app is quite mature, people still want to see active development.
So what's going on is an attempt to make a "Eudora substitute" based on the Thunderbird codebase. What they'll probably end up with is something along the lines of the Advanced Tea Substitute that the Heart of Gold created for Arthur Dent, which he noted was "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". Nonetheless, they're trying.
HTH.HAND.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.