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Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available To the Public (medium.com)
Computer History Museum (CHM), an institution which explores the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, announced on Tuesday the public release and long-term preservation of the Eudora source code, one of the early successful email clients, as part of its Center for Software History's Historical Source Code. The release comes after a five-year negotiation with Qualcomm. From the press release: The first version of Eudora was created in the 1980s by Steve Dorner who was working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It took Dorner over a year to create the first version of Eudora, which had 50,000 lines of C code and ran only on the Apple Macintosh. In 1991, Qualcomm licensed Eudora from the University of Illinois and distributed it free of charge. Qualcomm later released Eudora as a consumer product in 1993, and it quickly gained popularity. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of users. After 15 years, in 2006, Qualcomm decided that Eudora was no longer consistent with their other major project lines, and they stopped development. The discussion with Qualcomm for the release of the Eudora source code by the company's museum took five years. Len Shustek, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum, writes: Eventually many email clients were written for personal computers, but few became as successful as Eudora. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of happy users. Eudora was elegant, fast, feature-rich, and could cope with mail repositories containing hundreds of thousands of messages. In my opinion it was the finest email client ever written, and it has yet to be surpassed. I still use it today, but, alas, the last version of Eudora was released in 2006. It may not be long for this world. With thanks to Qualcomm, we are pleased to release the Eudora source code for its historical interest, and with the faint hope that it might be resuscitated. I will muse more about that later.
This was my favorite mail client back in the days of MacTCP on my Macintosh LC with my screaming-fast (and dirty cheap, and unreliable) 14.4 Linelink modem.
If you just can't leave Eudora behind at the museum, try THE BAT! email client. Now certified for Windows 10!!
https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/
Apping appers use Appy mail like Appmail and Applook.
This is still my every day mail client. I feel like a fossil now ...
So, Qualcomm had the copyright to a piece of software that hasn't been remotely relevant to anyone this century, and has been out of development for 12 years. There's nothing about that piece of software that could REMOTELY be interesting as IP. Sure, the implementation itself (like all source code) may be under copyright, but there's no way there's any commercial value, trade secrets, or anything else in there that's relevant enough to protect at this point.
And yet they hold out for FIVE FLIPPIN' YEARS before they'll consent to the release of the source code? It sounds from TFA like they considered just granting a release to allow the museum to see and publish the code, but retain all copyrights (though they do get some points for eventually deciding to assign all the IP over to the museum, which allowed the museum to release the code under BSD).
But still. Five years. For a dead piece of software with no practical relevance.
And people wonder why technologists get so up in arms about bad software patents (which is pretty much all software patents). Large corporations are so trained to hold on to every remotely relevant piece of IP for the litigation battlefield that a common sense decision like this takes FIVE YEARS. IP is well beyond the point of common sense. Or the original point of the patent system of encouraging innovation by requiring disclosure of novel methods. IP is ammunition, and by god everything's a gunfight.
I wonder if the closed source version of Tuxracer or Descent 3 will ever be open sourced ?
Probably one of the few people left who still use it on a daily basis (ver 7.1.0.9)
There was a simple pattern match to see if you sent a flamewar email. I'm sure it was string matches and counting.
I supported a number of people who used the client. Many, maybe even most, insisted on calling it eNdora instead of eUdora. Never understood why that was so common or persistent.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
It's just pining for the fjords.
Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time....
- Chuq
According to the last email I received in it, I stopped using it on December 20, 2015. I still have it to dig through old emails, which I just did the other day. It stores mail in the MBOX format so I could theoretically read it in other software, but just as easy to use Eudora itself while I still can. It has a great, easy to use search function.
I switched to Outlook because a majority of the emails I was starting to get weren't displaying properly. (MIME and HTML formatted emails.) I have outlook because I have office installed. Thunderbird has problems when you have a lot of email. last time I delt with it, it stored in a flat file format that INCLUDED all the attachments. I believe Outlook is a flat file sans attachments. (I'm using it locally, not with an exchange server)
I'm on Windows 7, but the next machine will likely have 10, and that will probably be the end of Eudora unless it works in compatibility mode. Not sure I want to re-install it anyway on next upgrade.
I actually like outlook quite a bit. It's pretty usable. One piece of software Microsoft did a reasonable job with.
Where is that source code ??? I WANT IT !!!
Penelope was Eudora OSE (the Open Source Edition)
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Eudora_Releases
since the Computer History Museum (CHM) now has the domain maybe they could restore the downloads / extensions ?
Eudora was a wonderfully powerful and adaptable email client for the Mac. I used it until about five years ago when it finally became unreliably flaky on the Mac. It had great sorting and filtering capabilities and let me make note on emails, which makes them much more useful for me by putting them in context. It's far more flexible than Apple Mail, but it was getting very flaky in dealing with HTML mail. There were some efforts to replicate it in open-source software, but I don't think they got anywhere.
For years I used the Eudora email client and the Eudora Internet Mail Server (EIMS). (unrelated code and origins) EIMS was a fairly simple, but rock-stable MTA that could run on very old hardware and even OS9. Spin it up and forget it. And its cost for unlimited users and domains ($200) made it an easy choice.
I believe that one thing that kept EIMS focused on its core functions was that it was maintained by just one developer - Glenn Anderson. Time passed and Glenn got offers to do cgi work on movies like the LOTR franchise, so he eventually stopped development. (and, to be fair, EIMS never had much of a market share, so it probably never generated much $$ for Glenn)
Shhhh! - I still have a 12(?) year old Mac in the basement running EIMS, though I stopped using the Eudora mail client years ago.
Eudora had useful features others still do not have. Finely detailed configuration of the UI, floating windows, access to the complete raw email, the "Who" column, detailed control of toolbars, separation of attachments from the messages (a seriously useful tool) and simple, powerful filtering and sorting.
One feature that was very useful was Message Redirection which would discretely rewrite an email message to another recipient while making the message look like it came from the original sender.
Kriston
Apple Mail had the "redirect" feature at least until Snow Leopard (they may have removed it in the iPhonification of the OS - I stopped using Macs after Snow Leopard). I think it inherited it from NeXT Mail.
Still using it to this day on Windows 10, with only a few minor quirks (including difficulty rendering some extended characters). I have found nothing else that meets one of my essential criteria: saving mail locally to my hard drive in RAW TEXT format, with individual files representing each folder i've created.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
One feature that was very useful was Message Redirection which would discretely rewrite an email message to another recipient while making the message look like it came from the original sender.
This is called ‘Resending’ and is present in many current MUAs under various names. Only Resent-* headers are added to the message before submitting to the MSA.
Eudora always let you resent without *any* to indicate the bounce had happened.
Kriston
Eudora is 21 years older than Snow Leopard.
Kriston
Nice to see that it's published under a liberal license. It'll be very cool if a derivative project catches on.
Eudora on a Mac was the only graphical email program I ever used. I switched to pine when I replaced MacOS with Linux, and switched to mutt not long after. But I have to admit, Eudora was super nice when I was using it.
Interesting that the Mac and Windows versions are completely different products. Different programming languages altogether. Also interesting that the Mac version is 70 MB while the Windows version is 458 MB! What's that about?
I'll admit that there's part of me (a very very small part of me) that would like to have a go at a Linux port. But ENOTIME.