Old news by now, but some of weeks ago Qualcomm announced a change in the development of its venerable email client, Eudora: future version will be based on the Thunderbird technology, and will be free and open sourced.
Yesterday
I'm using email since 1995, and is now an integral part of my day. At that time I worked on the original Mac OS platform, and the client of choice for reading messages offline was Eudora: in those days we had only modems, we paid far too much for slow and unstable connections, and reading emails online was possible just for those who were within an university network. As a result I was, as everybody else at the time, much more inclined to think before write, to compose long and coherent messages and to quote properly (like in putting the new text below the quoted passage...)
Eudora was a small program that I could run on my LC without any memory shortage even with large number of messages and mailboxes (MacSOUP was another gem for offline newsgroup reading), incredibly configurable thru preferences visible and hidden, and it communicated the sense of humour of its author Steve Dorner. Using Eudora shaped the way I read email even today, on a PC laptop, with a new window for every message and an incredibly fast search.
Today
But today Eudora is not an application anymore, it is a product. And products have strange, interesting lives. For example, by being produced by companies they're usually supposed to make some profit first, and to make clients happy second. I don't know if Eudora was profitable for Qualcomm, but surely many clients were not happy: the Eudora forums registered many complaints about the brokenness of the IMAP implementation in the 7.0 version, so many that a dedicated forum was created to gather all the discussions. Indeed, Eudora 7.0 was so broken for IMAP that I reverted immediately to 6.2, patting myself on the back for the backup I made previously.
The announce sparked a number of reactions and speculations about the possible evolutions for Eudora, the more interesting coming from the Mac side (notably, the Macintouch report and the TidBITS thread).
Tomorrow (or, what's wrong with Eudora?)
What's exactly wrong with Eudora today? It's weak in HTML mail rendering, and people accustomed to the Email for Dummies interfaces of Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail do not seem to be able to grasp the multi window approach. There is not a single, cross-platform codebase: the Windows and Mac versions are separated applications, without feature parity.
To summarize, Eudora is a Mac-like application on Mac OS, and a Windows-like application on Windows, is extremely fast at searching, holds large quantities of messages, has an efficient interface for power users and is very configurable. Let me repeat the question, what exactly is wrong with Eudora? It's just HTML rendering and a cross-platform codebase? I hope that doesn't have to come along with bloat and clunkiness.
Yesterday
I'm using email since 1995, and is now an integral part of my day. At that time I worked on the original Mac OS platform, and the client of choice for reading messages offline was Eudora: in those days we had only modems, we paid far too much for slow and unstable connections, and reading emails online was possible just for those who were within an university network. As a result I was, as everybody else at the time, much more inclined to think before write, to compose long and coherent messages and to quote properly (like in putting the new text below the quoted passage...)
Eudora was a small program that I could run on my LC without any memory shortage even with large number of messages and mailboxes (MacSOUP was another gem for offline newsgroup reading), incredibly configurable thru preferences visible and hidden, and it communicated the sense of humour of its author Steve Dorner. Using Eudora shaped the way I read email even today, on a PC laptop, with a new window for every message and an incredibly fast search.
Today
But today Eudora is not an application anymore, it is a product. And products have strange, interesting lives. For example, by being produced by companies they're usually supposed to make some profit first, and to make clients happy second. I don't know if Eudora was profitable for Qualcomm, but surely many clients were not happy: the Eudora forums registered many complaints about the brokenness of the IMAP implementation in the 7.0 version, so many that a dedicated forum was created to gather all the discussions. Indeed, Eudora 7.0 was so broken for IMAP that I reverted immediately to 6.2, patting myself on the back for the backup I made previously.
The announce sparked a number of reactions and speculations about the possible evolutions for Eudora, the more interesting coming from the Mac side (notably, the Macintouch report and the TidBITS thread).
Tomorrow (or, what's wrong with Eudora?)
What's exactly wrong with Eudora today? It's weak in HTML mail rendering, and people accustomed to the Email for Dummies interfaces of Outlook, Thunderbird and Apple Mail do not seem to be able to grasp the multi window approach. There is not a single, cross-platform codebase: the Windows and Mac versions are separated applications, without feature parity.
To summarize, Eudora is a Mac-like application on Mac OS, and a Windows-like application on Windows, is extremely fast at searching, holds large quantities of messages, has an efficient interface for power users and is very configurable. Let me repeat the question, what exactly is wrong with Eudora? It's just HTML rendering and a cross-platform codebase? I hope that doesn't have to come along with bloat and clunkiness.
I know this is 2 years later but Eudora isn‘t really a product anymore either. The latest frustration is that the only support option is the Eudora forum, and like the author I have been a PAID licensee since 1995. However, when I tried to register for the forum boards today, I got a nasty email saying I wasn‘t qualified to participate. What is that all about?