Eudora (e-mail client)
Encyclopedia
Eudora ju: is an e-mail client
used on the Apple Macintosh
and Microsoft Windows
operating system
s. It also supports several palmtop
computing platforms, including Newton
and the Palm OS
.
The software was named after American author Eudora Welty
, because of her short story Why I Live at the P.O. Eudora was developed in 1988 by Steve Dorner
, who worked at the Computer Services Organization of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
. Eudora was acquired by Qualcomm
in 1991. In 2006 Qualcomm stopped development of the commercial version, and sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based on Mozilla Thunderbird
, code-named Penelope
.
) and Pro (commercial) product. Between 2003 and 2006, the full-featured Pro version was also available as a "Sponsored mode" (adware
) distribution.
Eudora (6.0.1) added support for Bayesian filtering
of spam
with a feature called SpamWatch. Eudora (6.2) added a scam watch feature that flags suspicious links within e-mails in an attempt to thwart phishing
. Eudora (7.0) added Ultra-Fast Search, which finds any emails using single or multiple criteria in seconds.
Eudora has support for 'Stationery', a standard message or reply prepared ahead of time to a common question. Eudora stores e-mails in the mbox
format, which uses plain text file
s instead of a database as Microsoft Outlook
does. This allows the user to back up portions of their e-mail correspondence without backing up the entire database
.
Eudora supports the POP3
, IMAP
and SMTP
protocols. Eudora also has support for SSL and, in Windows, S/MIME authentication, allowing users to sign or encrypt email communications for greatest security.
Eudora is noteworthy for its extensive variety of settings to customize its behavior, many of which are not available in the user interface but are accessed using numbered "x-eudora-setting" URIs that must be pasted into a message and clicked.
At one time, Eudora also offered a webmail version at eudoramail.com. This service was run by Lycos
as part of Mailcity, later renamed Lycos Mail. As of 2006, Eudoramail addresses for users still work (and are redirected to Lycos Mail accounts), but new users cannot sign up for the service.
announced that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same technology platform as Mozilla Thunderbird
and be open source
. The codename for this project is "Penelope
". Penelope is developed by the Mozilla Foundation
, and the project is being led by the former Qualcomm team, including original developer Steve Dorner
. Eudora, although based on Open Source Thunderbird software, is not wholly open source.
Penelope is available as an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird. The Paid mode commercial version of Eudora is no longer available as of May 1, 2007. The Light/Sponsored mode versions of Eudora continue to be available for download.
As of July 2, 2010, the name was changed to Eudora OSE (Open Source Edition) and the version number was reset to 1.0 when it was released. From the beta 1.0 release candidate 1 readme.txt:
The first release version of Eudora OSE 1.0 became available on September 13, 2010. Since that time, all activity and development has ceased and developers continue to ignore queries about future updates much less the future of Eudora.
Eudora OSE does not retain the original mbox data structure, which stores all attachments as individual files together in one folder. It uses the same modern mbox file used by Apple Mail and others. No software is currently developed/supported that can access old Eudora mail archives directly, without import/conversion.
Many Eudora users responded poorly to the direction Penelope took. Similarly, reception to Eudora OSE continues to be lukewarm months after the release. As it stands, the intended updates to be released in parallel with new Thunderbird releases have not materialized and continue to lead to frustration and disappointment in the Eudora community. Rather than make pronouncements and calling Eudora "Open Source", it is more correct to call it limited Open Source. The source code to Eudora OSE cannot be downloaded in any form.
This does not constitute a classic OSE scenario for an expired product. (ie. Eudora 7's complete and actual code being made available for GPL or OSE development by a community of users). This is however identical to the Netscape
Gecko transition, eventually resulting in Firefox.
Instead Thunderbird is given a Eudora skin, leaving the entire back-end to be Thunderbird/Mozilla. Part of Eudora's popularity was arguably the ease of which utilities could be built for it. This encouraged users and businesses to adapt it to a variety of integrated solutions. Thunderbird's backend is incompatible with these utilities.
E-mail client
An email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent , is a computer program used to manage a user's email.The term can refer to any system capable of accessing the user's email mailbox, regardless of it being a mail user agent, a relaying server, or a human typing on a terminal...
used on the Apple Macintosh
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
and Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s. It also supports several palmtop
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...
computing platforms, including Newton
Apple Newton
The MessagePad was the first series of personal digital assistant devices developed by Apple for the Newton platform in 1993. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's MessagePad devices was done in Japan by the Sharp Corporation...
and the Palm OS
Palm OS
Palm OS is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants in 1996. Palm OS is designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provided with a suite of basic applications for personal information management...
.
The software was named after American author Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, because of her short story Why I Live at the P.O. Eudora was developed in 1988 by Steve Dorner
Steve Dorner
Steve Dorner is an American software engineer. He developed the Eudora e-mail client in 1988 as a part of his work as a staff member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dorner was hired by Qualcomm in July 1992 and Eudora was subsequently acquired by Qualcomm...
, who worked at the Computer Services Organization of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
. Eudora was acquired by Qualcomm
Qualcomm
Qualcomm is an American global telecommunication corporation that designs, manufactures and markets digital wireless telecommunications products and services based on its code division multiple access technology and other technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, USA...
in 1991. In 2006 Qualcomm stopped development of the commercial version, and sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based on Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
, code-named Penelope
Penelope (e-mail client)
Penelope is an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client software implementing some features of Eudora.-History:On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm announced that development of the existing Eudora email client software had ended, and that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same...
.
History
Originally distributed for free, Eudora was commercialized and offered in a Light (freewareFreeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
) and Pro (commercial) product. Between 2003 and 2006, the full-featured Pro version was also available as a "Sponsored mode" (adware
Adware
Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertisements to a computer. These advertisements can be in the form of a pop-up. They may also be in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during...
) distribution.
Eudora (6.0.1) added support for Bayesian filtering
Bayesian spam filtering
Bayesian spam filtering is a statistical technique of e-mail filtering. It makes use of a naive Bayes classifier to identify spam e-mail.Bayesian classifiers work by correlating the use of tokens , with spam and non spam e-mails and then using Bayesian inference to calculate a probability that an...
of spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
with a feature called SpamWatch. Eudora (6.2) added a scam watch feature that flags suspicious links within e-mails in an attempt to thwart phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
. Eudora (7.0) added Ultra-Fast Search, which finds any emails using single or multiple criteria in seconds.
Eudora has support for 'Stationery', a standard message or reply prepared ahead of time to a common question. Eudora stores e-mails in the mbox
Mbox
mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of electronic mail messages. All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file...
format, which uses plain text file
Text file
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists within a computer file system...
s instead of a database as Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...
does. This allows the user to back up portions of their e-mail correspondence without backing up the entire database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
.
Eudora supports the POP3
Post Office Protocol
In computing, the Post Office Protocol is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern...
, IMAP
Internet Message Access Protocol
Internet message access protocol is one of the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval, the other being the Post Office Protocol...
and SMTP
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol is an Internet standard for electronic mail transmission across Internet Protocol networks. SMTP was first defined by RFC 821 , and last updated by RFC 5321 which includes the extended SMTP additions, and is the protocol in widespread use today...
protocols. Eudora also has support for SSL and, in Windows, S/MIME authentication, allowing users to sign or encrypt email communications for greatest security.
Eudora is noteworthy for its extensive variety of settings to customize its behavior, many of which are not available in the user interface but are accessed using numbered "x-eudora-setting" URIs that must be pasted into a message and clicked.
At one time, Eudora also offered a webmail version at eudoramail.com. This service was run by Lycos
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. is a search engine and web portal established in 1994. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, webhosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.-Corporate history:...
as part of Mailcity, later renamed Lycos Mail. As of 2006, Eudoramail addresses for users still work (and are redirected to Lycos Mail accounts), but new users cannot sign up for the service.
Successors
On October 11, 2006, QualcommQualcomm
Qualcomm is an American global telecommunication corporation that designs, manufactures and markets digital wireless telecommunications products and services based on its code division multiple access technology and other technologies. Headquartered in San Diego, CA, USA...
announced that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same technology platform as Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
and be open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
. The codename for this project is "Penelope
Penelope (e-mail client)
Penelope is an extension for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client software implementing some features of Eudora.-History:On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm announced that development of the existing Eudora email client software had ended, and that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same...
". Penelope is developed by the Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
, and the project is being led by the former Qualcomm team, including original developer Steve Dorner
Steve Dorner
Steve Dorner is an American software engineer. He developed the Eudora e-mail client in 1988 as a part of his work as a staff member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dorner was hired by Qualcomm in July 1992 and Eudora was subsequently acquired by Qualcomm...
. Eudora, although based on Open Source Thunderbird software, is not wholly open source.
Penelope is available as an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird. The Paid mode commercial version of Eudora is no longer available as of May 1, 2007. The Light/Sponsored mode versions of Eudora continue to be available for download.
As of July 2, 2010, the name was changed to Eudora OSE (Open Source Edition) and the version number was reset to 1.0 when it was released. From the beta 1.0 release candidate 1 readme.txt:
Beta versions of Eudora OSE were originally named just Eudora with a version number of 8.0. This caused some confusion in that some users expected the new version to be a regular update to Classic Eudora. Since Eudora OSE uses an entirely different code base from Classic Eudora, in an effort to reduce the confusion the application was renamed to Eudora OSE (Open Source Edition). The version number was also reset to 1.0, which has the added benefit that it is synchronized with the Penelope version number.
The first release version of Eudora OSE 1.0 became available on September 13, 2010. Since that time, all activity and development has ceased and developers continue to ignore queries about future updates much less the future of Eudora.
Eudora OSE does not retain the original mbox data structure, which stores all attachments as individual files together in one folder. It uses the same modern mbox file used by Apple Mail and others. No software is currently developed/supported that can access old Eudora mail archives directly, without import/conversion.
Many Eudora users responded poorly to the direction Penelope took. Similarly, reception to Eudora OSE continues to be lukewarm months after the release. As it stands, the intended updates to be released in parallel with new Thunderbird releases have not materialized and continue to lead to frustration and disappointment in the Eudora community. Rather than make pronouncements and calling Eudora "Open Source", it is more correct to call it limited Open Source. The source code to Eudora OSE cannot be downloaded in any form.
This does not constitute a classic OSE scenario for an expired product. (ie. Eudora 7's complete and actual code being made available for GPL or OSE development by a community of users). This is however identical to the Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
Gecko transition, eventually resulting in Firefox.
Instead Thunderbird is given a Eudora skin, leaving the entire back-end to be Thunderbird/Mozilla. Part of Eudora's popularity was arguably the ease of which utilities could be built for it. This encouraged users and businesses to adapt it to a variety of integrated solutions. Thunderbird's backend is incompatible with these utilities.
External links
- Classic Eudora
- Eudora OSE 1.0
- MailForge (Formerly Odysseus), another eMail client intended to replicate the functionality of Eudora.