News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

September 4, 2007

software

Eudora is back… kinda

Posted Sep. 4, ’07, 7:39 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Eudora Some of you may remember a little email client named Eudora. As time has worn on and better and less expensive (read as “free”) competition has appeared to challenge the once very popular email client, it slowly faded from people’s memories. I must admit the whole “advertising supported mode” probably accelerated that death. More recently, many users are dropping real email clients in favor of webmail. I won’t pretend that it’s a better solution (I believe it’s not). However, the trend was started and Eudora dropped off most people’s radar.

Qualcomm stopped selling the software and vowed that it would return as a Thunderbird variant known as Penelope. To quote the notice on their website:

The Paid mode commercial versions of Eudora are no longer available as of May 1st, 2007. The Sponsored mode versions of Eudora continue to be available for download. An open source version of Eudora® is being developed by Mozilla and will be free of charge.

It’s being developed by Mozilla? But wait, they’ve already made it clear they want to dump Thunderbird. Given that news, I thought the Penelope project was dead. Apparently not as they’ve released Eudora 8.0.0b1 for our examination. Thus far, the changes are primarily cosmetic. Reports on MacUpdate seem to suggest the release is incapable of importing old Eudora data, which kinda defeats the purpose. It also feels very much like Thunderbird (despite different toolbar icons, ooooh).

I’d like to be more positive about the future of this product, but given Qualcomm’s desire to dump Eudora and Mozilla’s desire to dump Thunderbird, I think we’ll end up with some that’s worse off than either of the original products. It’ll be something that two companies want to dump.


1 Comments

Walt said:

I checked it out yesterday and found it to be a clone of Thunderbird. I guess that should stand to reason, considering the source (code). Only the icons in the toolbar have changed.

September 4, 2007 8:09 AM

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