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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.
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!
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!
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!
"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.
Wait, what? Sorry.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
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.
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