Will The [Thunder]bird Of Happiness Perch On Penelope’s Shoulder?
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It’s been nearly a month since Qualcomm has stopped selling the full version of Eudora, its well known and polished mail client.
It was announced several months ago that the development of the program had stopped, leaving time for the company to crush Nokia in court over patent infringement. Yes, that Qualcomm.
At that time, an announcement was made that Eudora would be moving to Open Source, as a project of the Mozilla foundation. As I have been really disappointed with its other e-mail offering of late, see here, I was wondering how much of the personality of Eudora would go into the new project, codename Penelope.
It would seem that most of the underpinnings of the program will stay with the Thunderbird code. That could be both good and bad. The good part is that the strict e-mail part of that program is very solid, and does exactly what it should. The less than adequate part of this is knowing that Eudora users are used to doing things a certain way, and if that way is changed, the user base will move somewhere else, or stay with revision 7.1 of the product.
More good news is that on the development page for Penelope, a quick perusal reveals that all six of the core team have worked at Qualcomm, and five of the six are developers that have been working with the code base for a long time. This should lead to a very mature product, in a short period of time. If, however, there gets to be any qualms over the basic coding, this could be a very long production cycle. Hopefully, all will agree on the Thunderbird way of doing the basics.
There is a map of the proposed development, the current bug list, and a discussion area, here. If you are as excited about these new developments as I am, go and at least discuss the hopes and wishes you have for this software. And perhaps we’ll discover how Penelope is related to Eudora.
Tags: eudora, email, qualcomm, thunderbird
4 Comments
gary
August 9th, 2007
at 11:05am
What is happening with getting Eudora functionality into Thunderbird? I tried an earlier version and the one thing needed, filters, was not transitioned. Filter support includes importing our organizations thousands of existing filters and the filter log/selection page. Right now we have people using Eudora on VMware.
thx, g
the oracle
August 9th, 2007
at 11:51am
gary, since I’ve written this, Thunderbird has pretty much been abandoned by Mozilla. As far as I know only the barest minimum of work was done on Penelope. Now it looks like it may never happen. The head of Mozilla has really dropped the ball on this one.
A. Richter
September 5th, 2007
at 7:25am
I used Eudora way back in the mid to late 90s. Since I was using Outhouse at work, it was just easier to use it at home. A couple of years ago I totally abandonned MS applications and ran to OpenOffice.org and apps like Firefox and Thunderbird.
I will be honest, I really, really like Thunderbird. I was never overly attached to Eudora, which made sticking to Outhouse or Outhouse Express easier. Thunderbird has just recently put out a new version, and not long before that had some core fixes on update. So your statement that Mozilla has abandonned Thunderbird would appear, on its face, to be erroneous.
Also, the use of extensions (add-ons) etc. with Thunderbird, is easy, and easily updatable. Setting up accounts is a breeze, even for the uninitiated. The user interface is very intuitive (which is the one thing I remember disliking about Eudora). However, if I had one complaint, it’s the ability to easily copy headers to send to abuse mailboxes for spam complaints.
the oracle
September 5th, 2007
at 9:02am
A. - apparently you did not go to the link, or perhaps the link is now invalid. Thunderbird is pretty much dead for now. A new version of Eudora came out yesterday, along with a long, convoluted explanation of the differences between Thunderbird, Eudora, and Penelope. None of these explanations are the same as what was given when I wrote the above article.
The strange thing is that the name Eudora was to be shelved, completely. Yesterday, a version called 8.00 beta 1 showed up on beta news, and it is supposed to be shareware, at $50. At the same time, it is available from Mozilla.org for free. Same revision level by the way.
Who knows - I didn’t like the fact that stuff was added that did not work - at all. This was different than when I had previously used it, and it worked. Now, who knows? I am using Windows Desktop Mail. It works well, and rather than making a snide remark, I’ll give MS their due - they made a good program.
Thanks for the comment.