Eudora is dead. Long live Eudora
September 4th, 2007 by Randy Stewart, Product Manager
The Mozilla foundation has picked up development of Eudora and released a beta of their Thunderbird powered update to the venerable email client.
Brief History
If you’re an old time internet guy like myself, you might remember a little email application called Eudora. Eudora was one of the first email applications on a non-Unix system. Eudora started off as a free program, but eventually, became a for pay email client.
Around the turn of the century, Eudora kind of got lost in the world where email applications became free or were included with some more powerful package. In the Windows world, Eudora lost ground to “free” email apps. You had the choice of Microsoft Outlook, which you got “free” when you bought Microsoft Office, or Thunderbird, which you could download for free from Mozilla.
Eudora Reborn
Several months ago having effectively stopped developing Eudora all together, Qualcomm released the source code of Eudora for anyone who wanted to continue development. The Mozilla foundation took the Eudora interface and grafted it onto the Thunderbird mail client.
Eudora has had a storied history, but was one of the first and best email applications around. I’m glad Qualcomm made Eudora open source and Mozilla has picked up development efforts for the application. I haven’t looked at it in years, so maybe I’ll find something that I like.
Download the beta (via Ars Technica and Daring Fireball)