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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.
So, it's really not Eudora, it's Thunderbird with some Eudora-like widgets thrown in. It's "Eudora" in name only, than?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Give me offline web clients and then we'll talk. I fly, I train, I have a portable modem on my cell phone, but it's not reliable enough for the train and isn't allowed when I fly. These are good times for me to send email or at least clean up my inbox... the offline features of both Thunderbird and Outlook make them very productive times for me... gmail, not so much.
Not saying that the rich web clients are great for some people, just saying there's still plenty of space for the full blown apps.
Huh. I remember Eudora.
*goes back to gmail*
Seriously though, the days where I used a full email client for personal email are long gone. I have Thunderbird installed here somewhere, I think, and every so often I use it to download and save my gmail messages, but really... webmail has long been the choice for people who are not especially paranoid. (Including businesses, which have to be paranoid for legal reasons, plus there's the bonus of having somebody to fire when something goes wrong with the email.) (I actually am a little paranoid, hence the Thunderbird-downloading-saving, but not enough to forgo the convenience of webmail.)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I still use Eudora (5.1). The reason is simple: it just works. Obviously I'm not using Outlook etc. And I have/am occasionally trying Thunderbird, but so far Eudora works best for me. One of the biggest points in its favour: all settings and stored mail can be easily ported in a single folder. It's really a stand alone program and a highly configurable one at that.
I'd like to switch to Thunderbird or one of the forks but so far they're just not "easy" enough. Yes a lot of that is not wanting the learning curve, but unlike with other software, where a few days working with the better/newer program is enough to convince me, I haven't found a better email client so far.
I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.
At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.
I haven't looked back since then, though I do miss the window layout. It's one of the few MDI designs I actually liked. Eh, there's probably an extension for Thunderbird. Other than Penelope, I mean.
...something you have to pay for with Yahoo. Perhaps you are the only one on Slashdot who didn't check for POP3 in GMail.
Think outside the world of Web browsers you're in right now. Think about Client Factories and such. Why does a future Web protocol manager or whatever have to be tied to similar limitations we have now? Especially since it would be designed with these limitations in mind. A benefit the original HTTP authors didn't have.
Can a web language be developed that's recursive? How about a protocol definition language? Can we create rich UI's on the fly outside the browser? When are we going to have enough bandwidth to reasonably transfer users preferences, programs and data over a wire?
I'm just trying to think outside the box here a little. HTTP was designed to deliver HTML. Simple solution to a simple idea. But things are different now. We have stronger machines, faster wires, more devices and a desire to be more and more connected. HTTP was designed to fulfill a need and has since been manipulated 1000 fold. Why can't we learn form this, build something new that's more in tune with what people want? That is to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. Preserve a persons preferences among all applications. Share data across different programs, etc.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I want to thank you for years of effort on Eudora. I still use it on OS X, and other than some occasional mailbox corruption issues when compacting mailboxes, it's been really solid for me.
I look forward to charting the progress of the new Eudora/Penelope.
Keep up the good work.
Agree 100%. You might want to check out NewIO ( http://www.newio.org/ ).