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Mozilla The Internet Communications Software

Mozilla Quietly Resurrects Eudora 309

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the thunderous-applause dept.
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.
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Mozilla Quietly Resurrects Eudora More

Mozilla Quietly Resurrects Eudora

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  • Who knew? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:23PM (#20485199)
    I used to use eudora back in the 90s. Then they incorporated the IE engine for mail rendering and a lot of their security lead over MS Lookout was lost so I moved on. But I had no idea that Qualcomm donated it to Mozilla last year. Kinda gives me pangs of nostalgia.

    • Re:Who knew? (Score:5, Informative)

      by spungebob ( 239871 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:50PM (#20485737)
      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's been said... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:25PM (#20485245) Homepage
    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.

  • That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beavis88 ( 25983 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:29PM (#20485303)
    "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?
    • I'm a bit confused on that myself. But...

      Penelope will be just an extension, and as such will be missing a few features which can't be done as an extension.

      Eudora will be built using the thunderbird code base, allowing for it to have the couple of features that require more extensive modifications.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by eln ( 21727 ) *
        So what's up with the mozilla wiki then? I quote:

        "The first BETA release of Penelope (Eudora 8.0.0b1) is now available for download."

        That says to me that Penelope and Eudora are the same thing, even though there's all this press that says they aren't. Are they intentionally trying to confuse people?

      • Right, but the big unanswered question is, WHAT FEATURES?

        None of the information on the Mozilla page gave me any indication of why I might want to try Penelope or Eudora or whatever it's called. Not even a screenshot.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 )

      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?

      From what i can gather, I think you got it.

      Why you'd want Thunderbird to behave more like Eudora, I don't know. I guess a lot of Eudora users (full disclosure: I used to use Eudora back when I had dialup and Windows 3.x) might like a version of Thunderbird that behaves like Eudora in terms of key bindings, toolbars, etc.

      The question is: If Eudora/Penelope is a plugin for Thunderbird, why not make a 'Linux Eudora' as well?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by empaler ( 130732 )
      I think it is something like this:
      Thunderbird and Eudora are basically the same, a major part of the differences is deployed through a plugin that works with both; certain of the plugin's features are incompatible with Thunderbird, though..
      HTH.
    • Exactly! Let's get away from the corporate bullshit!

      Support Icedove and Iceweasel! They're just like thunderbird and firefox, but....

      [% insert foot_icon_here %]
    • I was trying to decipher that, myself. He seems to be saying that Penelope is not the open-source Eudora that they've been talking about. But then at the top of the MozillaWiki page it announces "The first BETA release of Penelope (Eudora 8.0.0b1) is now available for download." Eh?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by nine-times ( 778537 )
      My interpretation is:
      They're releasing a new version of Eudora, based on Thunderbird. Many of the changes that make Eudora different from Thunderbird will be made through an extension called "Penelope". So "Eudora" will be a modified version of Thunderbird with Penelope already installed, but you can install Penelope with the normal version of Thunderbird and it should kind of work.

      I think that's what they're saying, but I'm not positive.

    • Re:That wiki makes my head hurt (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:59PM (#20486747)
      Looking at the comments in this thread, I think we can safely assume that not one of us really has a clue as to what is going on. I cheerfully admit I don't.

      • Looking at the comments in this thread, I think we can safely assume that not one of us really has a clue as to what is going on. I cheerfully admit I don't.

        I don't know why you're bringing this up now. It's not like it's any different from any other thread here on Slashdot....

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ScrewMaster ( 602015 )
          True, very true. But this one seemed to have less of the usual level of fractiousness, and more of an air of utter confusion.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jonadab ( 583620 )
        > Looking at the comments in this thread, I think we can safely assume that not one
        > of us really has a clue as to what is going on. I cheerfully admit I don't.

        You have to know some background. Chiefly, you have to know what Eudora is. Eudora is (or was, at any rate) one of the major proprietary GUI-based mailreaders. A couple of years ago it was the second-oldest one still under development, and then the company behind it decided for whatever reason that they weren't going to maintain it any more.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by stefanlasiewski ( 63134 )
      The Penelope Addion Page [mozilla.org] has a little more information:


      Penelope is the open source version of Eudora. This extension adds changes to the Thunderbird UI to provide a familiar UI for Eudora users. Many of the Eudora shortcuts are also supported including functionality not offered in Thunderbird.

      Penelope is an Add-on to Thunderbird which implements some a Eudora User Interface and some Eudora features.

  • Well, except that they haven't. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Onan ( 25162 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:30PM (#20485319)

    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 [mozilla.org], 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by garcia ( 6573 )
      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.

      Isn't that the goal of the vast majority of "successful" Linux applications -- to look just like their Windows counterpart? Afterall, we're trying to get people to switch to a different platform that they will be mostly uncomfortable with if we don't.

      I don't use Outlook (I never have) but will be soon for work. It can't be any worse than Lotus Notes, Groupwise (whic

  • Lookin' good thunderbird (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:30PM (#20485333)

    the new Eudora application is not intended to compete with Thunderbird, but instead to complement it.
    Eudora: My Thunderbird, you look particularly ravishing tonight.
    Thunderbird Oh Eudora, you're too good to me!

    • Eudora: My Thunderbird, you look particularly ravishing tonight.
      Thunderbird Oh Eudora, you're too good to me!


      Internet Explorer: <burp!> What you doin' with my bitch, you Commie scum.
      Eudora: Don't hurt Thunderbird! It's you I loved all along!

      • Correction and continuation: (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:46PM (#20485639)

        Eudora: My Thunderbird, you look particularly ravishing tonight.
        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!
  • make a fully inclusive, very feature rich web client for your email.

    I'd love to see a Mozilla branded 'hotmail' type of mail account I could use. I'd pay for it, if it had functionality that Gmail or Hotmail had but then again, why reinvent the wheel? The rich client for email is on its way out, thin clients are in.

    That said, I think I'm the one guy on Slashdot that hates Gmail. I like Yahoo mail, and pay for it :)

    • Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Onan ( 25162 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:39PM (#20485497)
      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.

      • Yes well, some of us actually need webmail, and don't mind even a limited wordprocessor attached to it, so GMail is just the ticket. It's a helluva lot better that crap like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Onan ( 25162 )
          Out of curiosity, why would one need webmail?

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by zackeller ( 653801 )
            To check email anywhere in the world platform independent.

            Ever traveled much?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by repvik ( 96666 )
              Laptop? PDA? Cellphone?

              • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

                by operagost ( 62405 )
                Even a cell phone is infinitely larger than nothing (that is, just use whatever internet-attached computer is available). Nothing also doesn't have a monthly bill or require you to perform 30 cryptic key presses just to type "lol kthx bye".

            • Ever traveled much?

              About 50% of the time, at least 25 countries a year. Never used webmail except when I need to help someone else figure out why it's not working for them.

            • Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea.. (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Onan ( 25162 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:14PM (#20486105)

              Unless I'm missing something, doesn't ssh and mutt/pine/elm/whatever also allow you to get to your mail from anywhere?

              I do travel a fair bit, but I'm not willing to give my credentials and email to every random internet cafe machine I pass. And I have to admit, I'm kind of confused by people who are.

              I'm really only willing to give my credentials to a machine that I trust, which mostly means a machine of my own. So webmail doesn't really allow me to get to my mail from significantly more places than I can just have a civilized client running anyway.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by xrayspx ( 13127 )
              That's why I use IMAP.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Reapman ( 740286 )
            It's great if you travel light without a laptop or other mail capable device but near internet cafe's (like I did last year, also this way you have a gmail or w/e and assuming it's temporary, not giving out your REAL email / internet account password in an unsecured environment). Just one example. I prefer my IMAP, mind you, but webmail does serve a purpose.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bert64 ( 520050 )
            You want to be able to access it from anywhere (this means public terminals in airports, cafes etc), almost all of which have a browser but very few have ssh or the ability to install your own mail client.
            Although, modern smartphones are making this idea somewhat redundant.
      • Amen.

        (I'm only posting to this thread to get my .sig to show in it.)

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by nate nice ( 672391 )
        I think it's more likely that HTTP is overhauled to make Web Apps more practical and rich.

        This will probably be as a result of someone not happy with the current protocols inability to naturally support this type of communication without workarounds.

        I like the idea of Web Apps and what companies like Google are trying to do, through practicality and experimentation. I'd agree HTTP isn't ideal and that Javascript is involved too much in the work around. It's reasonable to believe that HTTP won't be the pro

        • The future will likely bring a protocol designed around this paradigm.
          Y'know, it's computing over a network, we could call it Network Computing. Or maybe Virtual Network Computing.
           
          • We can take as input a grammar and output a parser. Is it reasonable to think the same for a protocol? How about other elements of a networked program?

      • 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 gotta agree. I use Dovecot on Linux to run my own IMAPS server. I have complete control and complete and secure access from anywhere that has an email client that supports IMAPS (which is any modern email client) and wonder why anybody would want to surrender control of their email to

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Onan ( 25162 )
          Organizing by thread has certainly been around in real clients for far longer than gmail has existed.

          The first place I saw it was in mutt. I certainly use it every day in os x's Mail.app. I'm sure there are many other clients that offer it.

    • Re:Microsoft, Google, etc... have the right idea.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by skiflyer ( 716312 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:42PM (#20485575)
      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.
    • ***The rich client for email is on its way out, thin clients are in.***

      Not in the US ... At least not until "they" do something about broadband speeds. I just switched from the Gmail browser (thin) client to Thunderbird via POP3-SMTP. I don't care what Thunderbird is a clone of. Bringing the mail down to my machine for local processing is an order of magnitude more satisfactory than trying to read the stuff while it is on the Google servers.

    • ...something you have to pay for with Yahoo. Perhaps you are the only one on Slashdot who didn't check for POP3 in GMail.

  • It's "Eudora" in name only, than? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:31PM (#20485361)

    Whereas "Eudora" is a branded version of Thunderbird with some extra features added by the Eudora developers...

    So, it's really not Eudora, it's Thunderbird with some Eudora-like widgets thrown in. It's "Eudora" in name only, than?

  • Here's hoping the new Eudora includes the best features and functionality of both Eudora 7.x and Thunderbird (both of which I use daily). I haven't seen anything else which matches the the filtering capabilities in Eudora, but the HTML renderer is as powerful as a gopher browser. On the other hand, I really like Thunderbird's ability to keep multiple accounts separated and and treat their settings independently.

    Time will tell...

  • Penelope? Eudora? WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by eln ( 21727 ) *
    Ok, in the article on linux.com, they say Penelope is NOT Eudora (although they are similar). However, on the download page, the header of the page is "Penelope releases", and the first item under that (presumably a Penelope release) is labelled "Eudora 8.0.0b1".

    So, which is it? Are Penelope and Eudora the same thing or not?

    Also, I hope this Penelope thing goes through the usual Mozilla trend of changing its name 4 or 5 times, because that name is just not doing it for me. Maybe they should just call it

    • Also, I hope this Penelope thing goes through the usual Mozilla trend of changing its name 4 or 5 times

      Yeah, maybe something that skews a little younger so they can get a solid user base early. Something like.....Eudora the Explorer??

      *apologies, it's late and I'm getting tired*

  • According to the release page the new Eudora application is not intended to compete with Thunderbird, but instead to complement it.

    Complement pomplement - It's a competitor even if it runs on the same technology platform. But that's good, really good. I mean see what competition did to Mozilla/Firefox.

    I liked Eudora back in the end of the 90s, not sure if I would nowadays, but I for sure will give it a try.

  • In todays news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by packetmon ( 977047 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:42PM (#20485569) Homepage
    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
  • Will you be able to import decade-old and heavily munged Eudora email archives?

    They can get very out of hand...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kenshin ( 43036 )
      That's the only reason one of the guys at our office is still using Eudora: It's damn near impossible, unless you want to pay $50 for an app, to convert the database to any other mail program.
      • unless you want to pay $50 for an app, to convert the database to any other mail program.

        And these don't always work anyway; Eudora mail archives can get so out of hand and so munged that, eg, EmailAlchemy chokes on them.

        The only reliable way is to copy them to an imap server. And the beautifully crafted (NOT!) Eudora user interface makes this HORRIBLY difficult and time consuming.

        In other news, Eudora sucks and always has. And always will; if Mozilla give Thunderbird (what appears to be) a 'skin' to offer

  • Eudora could use some help!

    That (or something similar) was what Eudora used to say on Macs when it was having network problems or something like that.

    Just out of curiosity. Are there people that still use Eudora? And if so, do they have a reason? I have a friend who has to have Eudora because "its all he knows", and the sad thing is that he does not know the program at all. Is there a need that Eudora fills?

    I'm still and old-school *NIX guy that uses a mailer from a terminal. No GUI for me.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anspen ( 673098 )

      I still use Eudora (5.1). The reason is simple: it just works. Obviously I'm not using Outlook etc. And I have/am occasionally trying Thunderbird, but so far Eudora works best for me. One of the biggest points in its favour: all settings and stored mail can be easily ported in a single folder. It's really a stand alone program and a highly configurable one at that.

      I'd like to switch to Thunderbird or one of the forks but so far they're just not "easy" enough. Yes a lot of that is not wanting the learning

      • "all settings and stored mail can be easily ported in a single folder." The same is true for Thunderbird. Windows Vista Users\\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird Windows 2000, XP Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird Windows NT WINNT\Profiles\\Application Data\Thunderbird Windows 98, ME Windows\Application Data\Thunderbird Mac OS X ~/Library/Thunderbird Linux and Unix systems ~/.thunderbird

    • Re:Excuse me (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:19PM (#20486201) Homepage Journal

      Are there people that still use Eudora? And if so, do they have a reason?

      I used Eudora for years, until about the time Thunderbird was gearing up for version 1. What finally kicked me over the threshold was that I do a lot of work with spam detection, and so I needed access to the original format of each message. Eudora reformats messages as they arrive, separating out the attachments, adjusting the headers, and in some cases reformatting text.

      At the time I had a ~5-year-old collection of mail in Eudora. I must have imported that corpus dozens of times, looking for things that imported incorrectly, figuring out how to identify whether a message was in plaintext, richtext, HTML, etc. so that the importer could reconstruct the appropriate MIME headers, and filing bugs. By the time 1.0 was ready, it could import my 5 years of mail.

      I haven't looked back since then, though I do miss the window layout. It's one of the few MDI designs I actually liked. Eh, there's probably an extension for Thunderbird. Other than Penelope, I mean.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:53PM (#20485779)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:webmail, &c. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sax Maniac ( 88550 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:38PM (#20486459) Homepage Journal
      No webmail for me, well, I have it but don't really use it. I'm not paranoid, it's just applications inside a browser tend to such if you like keyboard shortcuts. Mouse mouse mouse mouse, drag drag drag, don't you dare touch that keyboard! Keyboard are for words, never commands, no no no you naughty boy! If I see another Web 2.0 nested scrollbar that is drawn with skinnable gradient-shaded in-browser popup translucent animated glowing brushed-metal AJAX WebKit JavaFaces++, 3 pixles wide on a 24" monitor so I can't even hit it, and it doesn't support PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN, but only drag, no, not even click under the scrollbar for a page-up click, I'm going to puke!

      Wait, what? Sorry.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JimBobJoe ( 2758 )
      *goes back to gmail*

      I like gmail, and I've entertained using it as my main email, but Eudora still has a bit more sophistication in its mail handling features that gmail lacks. Gmail's filtering is cool and will satisfy 95% of users, but Eudora's filtering is much more complex and is partially scriptable. (Automatically replying with a pre-written email if the subject satisfies certain criteria in the filter, or being able to forward an email that meets whatever criteria to more than one email address. Thes
    • I keep a GMail account mostly to receive large attachments from others. But it's too limited to by my primary email interface. With Thunderbird/IMAP/procmail I can create a hierarchy of folders by topic and intelligently route new mail into those folders, read/write email and news offline, and still search, etc, as GMail allows me to do. GMail could add these features (all but offline support, obviously), but Google's focus on search as the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything suggests that they

    • Re:webmail, &c. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BenoitRen ( 998927 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @06:29PM (#20487113)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by FleaPlus ( 6935 )

        Using an e-mail client is much easier, faster, and hassle-free, versus webmail.
        Wow, really? One of the main reasons I switched from thunderbird to gmail is because gmail was so much faster to start, search, and retrieve emails with. Of course, I also had a huge archive of emails that I never deleted, which gmail is geared towards.

        I also work across multiple machines, which was much more hassle-free with gmail than thunderbird.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Myopic ( 18616 )
      gmail is an impressive attempt to implement email using a web browser. nevertheless, it is nowhere near as good as a real email program. that same thing is true for all webapps. none of them are as good as they would be implemented in a more robust gui toolkit.

  • Hey, I've got a better name for this product (Score:5, Funny)

    by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @04:59PM (#20485899) Journal

    "PINE"!

    It'll stand for "PINE is not Eudora!"

    Whaddya mean, "Prior art"?

  • Why upgrade from my current Eudora? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:00PM (#20485903)
    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.

  • Actually, I'm kidding. I quite liked Eudora for it's simplicity. That and the fact that recovering mail was a breeze. After having gone through a few iterations of Microsoft Outlook PST hell and then finally wising up and using only IMAP with Thunderbird, I have to say that Eudora did things right for its day. I suspect the new Eudora will probably be a good deal different from the original. Although I wouldn't mind if they'd port it over to Linux since it's open source now. Thunderbird is OK, but it'

  • Subtle Vista bash? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kamokazi ( 1080091 )

    The following are the system requirements for each platform.

    Windows
    -------

    Operating Systems
    - Windows 98
    - Windows 98 SE
    - Windows ME
    - Windows NT 4.0
    - Windows 2000
    - Windows XP (Recommended)
    - Windows Vista

    Is that a subtle bash against Vista? Or is it just my expectation of the open source commnity to knock a MS product whenever possible? Yeah, I know it probably means they just more thoroughly test XP compatibility, but I wouldn't be paranoid if I didn't question it.

  • Driver required? (Score:4, Funny)

    by tetranz ( 446973 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:25PM (#20486291)
    With Penelope and Thunderbird, somewhere there's got to be a driver called Parker.

  • Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @05:39PM (#20486461) Journal
    Why not just release an official Thunderbird Extension Pack? Voila, Eudora?

    If it's just Thunderbird with some extensions, what's the point in a new product?

    It's making my mind wander to the old MSN Explorer of Microsoft, that was a customized Internet Explorer for their MSN network.
    But at least MS kept the name reasonably similar to not confuse too much.

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by Trogre ( 513942 )
    Eudora, are you kidding me?

    I'm tagging this one 'phoenix'. Rather fitting, since they've already used that name on another product.

  • Somewhat on topic.

    I never really liked eudora that much, but back then I was an OS/2 user, so PMMail is what I used. And they ported that to windoze, so I kept using it.

    Now I use sylpheed. It's a great linux client that has also been ported to windows. It supports local mailboxes on linux, pop, imap, ssl. It even runs great as a portable app off the USB drive when I am not at my own computers. This configuration works great with IMAP over SSL.

    My only complaint is that there is no way to tell it to reme

  • Clarifications (Score:5, Informative)

    by sdorner ( 1012437 ) <sdorner AT qualcomm DOT com> on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @06:48PM (#20487343)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by wavedeform ( 561378 )
      I want to thank you for years of effort on Eudora. I still use it on OS X, and other than some occasional mailbox corruption issues when compacting mailboxes, it's been really solid for me.

      I look forward to charting the progress of the new Eudora/Penelope.

      Keep up the good work.

  • WARNING: Do Not Install Alongside Thunderbird (Score:3, Informative)

    by CritterNYC ( 190163 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @10:40PM (#20489363) Homepage
    Eudora 8 is just a customized version of Thunderbird and not a different app in any way shape or form. If you install and run it on a machine that already has Thunderbird installed, it *WILL* mess up your existing Thunderbird profile.

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