Eudora Goes Open Source
Is there a widely-used Internet tool that's been around longer than Eudora? If so, it's not springing to mind. I've never been a regular user myself, but there are PC Worlders who swear by this venerable (est. 1988) e-mail program to this day, and we have a history of saying nice things about it (in 2003, we named it as the best e-mail program, period). It's had a low profile for a good long while, but today, Qualcomm, which has owned the product for 15 years, made it the subject of a major announcement: Eudora is going open source.
Actually, it's not Eudora as it exists today that's becoming an open-source product. Rather, Qualcomm says that a new version of Eudora will be built on top of Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client that's the sibling of Mozilla's Firefox browser. The details are a little vague at this point, but the project seems to involve preserving at least some of Eudora's unique personality while swapping out its aging underpinnings for Thunderbird's more up-to-date offerings.
With this news, Qualcomm released minor updates to the Windows and Mac versions of Eudora; they're $20 apiece and the company says it'll stop selling them when the new Thunderbird-ized Eudora is available. So if you're one of the Eudora faithful, you might want to grab 'em while you can.
It's impossible to tell whether this is good news for Eudora fans until the open source version arrives. (The somewhat similar reinvention of Netscape as a Mozilla-based browser doesn't seem to have done a thing to return it to relevance.) But it's been obvious for eons that Eudora was not exactly at the center of Qualcomm's world, or even on its periphery; as an open-source product, Eudora's fate won't be dependent on continued Qualcomm support. As long as there are people who love it, it can live on...
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This is probably good news -- Eudora was my first e-mail client, and despite brief flirtations with others, it's been my mainstay for the past 13 years. The only time I've seriously considered switching was when I tried out Thunderbird.
I hope that the new Eudora keeps two features I've long been a fan of. On the PC, all of the data files (including e-mail inboxes) are ASCII files, which makes tweaking easy and archiving future-proof. It's also easy to restore or copy a Eudora setup -- just install a fresh copy of Eudora then copy the entire data directory from the old to the new. You can be up and running in just a few minutes, just as if you never left.
...and in an ideal world, they'd also fix Eudora for Palm so it would stop deleting my attachments.
I fervently hope that Unicode and other support for languages such as Hebrew and Arabic will be incorporated early on. For years now, Outlook Express has handled these easily while Eudora simply ignored the issue and remained unusable in that way. That seemed rather strange. It would be good to have that cleared up in Penelope, and, preferably to have the capacity (that exists in OE) to choose whether to send in Unicode or in one of the other encodings.
Forget Eudora -- "The Bat!" is the email package to use.
First they took away WordStar, now Eudora!
One of the aspects of Eudora that I will miss is the junk/spam filter program, SpamNix, which by now has learned my e-mail patterns well enough to be about 98% efficient, with rare false positives.