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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.
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.
All applications expand their feature set until they are capable of reading email.
I guess Eudora, now based on Thunderbird, finally can make that claim.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
"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?
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.
Thunderbird Oh Eudora, you're too good to me!
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.
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.
US Postal Service announced it was creating a new department. Title "United States Postal Delivery and Management System" it will not interfere with the day to day duties of the US Postal Service which manages and delivers mail. It instead complements the current department
Infiltrated dot Net
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.
Thunderbird: Oh Eudora, you're too good to me!
Outlook: What you doin' with my bitch, you Commie scum.
Eudora: Don't hurt Thunderbird! It's you I loved all along!
Pine: Might I trouble you kind gents for a bit of bread?!
Outlook I thought I told you never to come out of your hole again!
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.
To check email anywhere in the world platform independent.
Ever traveled much?
I think it's more likely that HTTP is overhauled to make Web Apps more practical and rich.
This will probably be as a result of someone not happy with the current protocols inability to naturally support this type of communication without workarounds.
I like the idea of Web Apps and what companies like Google are trying to do, through practicality and experimentation. I'd agree HTTP isn't ideal and that Javascript is involved too much in the work around. It's reasonable to believe that HTTP won't be the protocol of the future.
It would appear what we see now, the movements towards richer interfaces and Javascript intensive Websites and Web Apps as the natural precursor to this protocol. We are interconnected and people are comfortable with it. We've become good at delivering data to a static content renderer and can manipulate it some with a client side programming language giving the impression of richness. People are trying to stretch this ability as far as they can and so far it has been practical. Needs will eventually outgrow what's possible however and a new protocol will have to be used.
Expect Web Apps and such to stick around. But keep in mind it's early and experimental right now. The future will likely bring a protocol designed around this paradigm.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
"PINE"!
It'll stand for "PINE is not Eudora!"
Whaddya mean, "Prior art"?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.
Unless I'm missing something, doesn't ssh and mutt/pine/elm/whatever also allow you to get to your mail from anywhere?
I do travel a fair bit, but I'm not willing to give my credentials and email to every random internet cafe machine I pass. And I have to admit, I'm kind of confused by people who are.
I'm really only willing to give my credentials to a machine that I trust, which mostly means a machine of my own. So webmail doesn't really allow me to get to my mail from significantly more places than I can just have a civilized client running anyway.
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.
With Penelope and Thunderbird, somewhere there's got to be a driver called Parker.
Even a cell phone is infinitely larger than nothing (that is, just use whatever internet-attached computer is available). Nothing also doesn't have a monthly bill or require you to perform 30 cryptic key presses just to type "lol kthx bye".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Why not just release an official Thunderbird Extension Pack? Voila, Eudora?
If it's just Thunderbird with some extensions, what's the point in a new product?
It's making my mind wander to the old MSN Explorer of Microsoft, that was a customized Internet Explorer for their MSN network.
But at least MS kept the name reasonably similar to not confuse too much.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
It *was* the email client of choice a decade ago. It's reign long ago ended.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Will EMACS finally be getting a decent editor added to its functionality?
hawk
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
Agree 100%. You might want to check out NewIO ( http://www.newio.org/ ).