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.

Comments

That wiki makes my head hurt

[beavis88]

"Whereas "Eudora" is a branded version of Thunderbird with some extra
features added by the Eudora developers, "Penelope" is an extension (also
called an "add-on") that is used in Eudora and can also be used with
Thunderbird. The Eudora installer includes the corresponding version of
Penelope along with it so there is no need to install Penelope if you are
installing Eudora. Most features in Penelope can be accessed when used with
Thunderbird, but there are a few that require Eudora in order to work
correctly and it's not something that gets tested."

Can anyone un-WTF that paragraph for my tired little brain? Eudora is basically like Thunderbird, and Penelope is an extension that works with either to make it behave like...Eudora? Wait, what?

Re:That wiki makes my head hurt

[Master of Transhuman]

Yes, it's clear to me that the sole reason this product exists is to ease migration from the original Eudora to Thunderbird/"New" Eudora for Eudora users - of whom there are probably millions.

It's a good move for the Thunderbird engine, in that context - get millions of new users who don't have to change their ways.

Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea..

[Onan]

No, I really loathe gmail as well. (And I work for Google.)

But I'm afraid that I may disagree with you on the broader topic. The reason I hate gmail is that it's webmail, and thus inherently something that is awful and should not be done. And indeed even more broadly, "web applications" are a terrible idea; the web makes a really crappy platform.

I would much rather have an elegant, well-designed, rapidly evolving application platform of my choice on which to run a variety of clients speaking well-defined protocols than try to retroactively turn a simple and reliable content-delivery medium into an entire operating system.

Why upgrade from my current Eudora?

[MDMurphy]

I'd need a good reason to upgrade from Eudora 6 that I'm using now. I've been using it since 1997 or so and have always been very happy. I don't use the IE rendering engine so it's clean, simple and just plain works. My filters have evolved over the last decade and work well. The small tidy files the mail is stored in a much more manageable than the humongous PST files Outlook uses so even my work machine has 8 years of email easily searchable.

I used a plugin for Google Desktop briefly to index the old messages, but searching was no easier that the built-in search so I just stopped using it.

Eudora is the one I app I have that over the years when I heard there was an upgrade my first thought was "why?" rather than "Great, I've been needing an upgrade".

I also use Gmail, having selected mail from my server go to both my Eudora POP account and my Gmail account. That gives me remote access and another backup If I have some funky formatted email that I don't just toss out, I view it in GMail via Opera where I'm well insulated from malicious attachments.

Eudora: It's old, it's boring, it works.

Re:webmail, &c.

[Sax Maniac]

No webmail for me, well, I have it but don't really use it. I'm not paranoid, it's just applications inside a browser tend to such if you like keyboard shortcuts. Mouse mouse mouse mouse, drag drag drag, don't you dare touch that keyboard! Keyboard are for words, never commands, no no no you naughty boy! If I see another Web 2.0 nested scrollbar that is drawn with skinnable gradient-shaded in-browser popup translucent animated glowing brushed-metal AJAX WebKit JavaFaces++, 3 pixles wide on a 24" monitor so I can't even hit it, and it doesn't support PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN, but only drag, no, not even click under the scrollbar for a page-up click, I'm going to puke!

Wait, what? Sorry.

Re:webmail, &c.

[BenoitRen]

I'm not paranoid, I'm just being efficient. Using an e-mail client is much easier, faster, and hassle-free, versus webmail. Yes, I have used webmail for years before I tried an e-mail client. I'm not going back.

Every time you want to do something in webmail you have to get a new page, wait, choose, wait, and so forth. With an e-mail client I don't have to wait at all, it's instantaneous. Or how about adding attachments in webmail? That's even more clumsy.

A bonus feature is that I can have my e-mail client open in the background, periodically checking e-mail, and it will alert me when I have received one or more of them.