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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.
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.
I *still* use Eudora (version 6-point-sumpin-or-other) and although I would have preferred for Qualcomm to keep it going, I was really happy to hear they were turning it over to Mozilla. That move really cemented my belief that the Eudora developers were Good People®.
Though I've been recommending Thunderbird to my friends and clients for what seems like forever, I could never convince myself to give up Eudora...
fwiw, adding IE rendering was totally a reaction at the time to the burgeoning popularity of Outlook and HTML-formatted emails. Thankfully it was optional and could be turned off, leaving Eudora as bulletproof as before.
It takes an idiot to do cool things - that's why it's cool!
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.