Before Thunderbird, Eudora was fantastic. We ran it at a college I worked at for most of the staff and faculty, and it was a very sad day when Qualcomm shut it down.
The last 'mainline' (pre-OSE) versions of Eudora for Mac and Windows were open-sourced and preserved as an artefact by the Computer History Museum[2] in 2018; as part of the preservation, the CHM assumed ownership of the Eudora trademark.
The only actively maintained fork of the software, known as Eudoramail as of June 2024, originates from 'mainline' Eudora for Windows as preserved by the CHM. Hermes, its current maintainers, describe Eudoramail 8.0 as currently being in alpha; Wellington publisher Jack Yan, meanwhile, points out its stability, a number of well-characterised and reproducible display bugs notwithstanding.
On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, the Computer History Museum acquired full ownership of the source code, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and domain names. The transfer agreement from Qualcomm also allowed the Computer History Museum to publish the source code under the BSD open source license. The Eudora source code distributed by the Computer History Museum is the same except for the addition of the new license, code sanitization of profanity within its comments, and the removal of third-party software whose distribution rights had long expired.
Eudora was practically a CULT. I worked for one of their users who straight refused to use anything else, and one of my ongoing jobs as an admin was trying to get Exchange to play nice with it. It was maddening.
I fired it up several times for testing purposes, I don't get the hype, but man, for some people it was just the best damn software ever made.
Eudora had its own very distinct take on mail client UI. Many loved it. I never really got on with it, although I could use it.
While the native codebase is probably too old to salvage now, there was a project to write a Eudora-style UI for Thunderbird as an add-on. That might be easier to revive for 21st century email.
I know people that used it because it was self contained for Windows if I remember correctly. I remember one person running the installation off of a Zip drive back in the 90's. I warned them that Zip disks like to randomly self destruct and he'd better be making backups.
hdgvhicv|3 months ago
bigfatkitten|3 months ago
https://www.pmail.com/v49x.htm
pkphilip|3 months ago
kstrauser|3 months ago
canucker2016|3 months ago
see https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-eudora-email-client-sou...
and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)#Hiatus_a... recent news, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)#Under_He...ToucanLoucan|3 months ago
I fired it up several times for testing purposes, I don't get the hype, but man, for some people it was just the best damn software ever made.
lproven|3 months ago
While the native codebase is probably too old to salvage now, there was a project to write a Eudora-style UI for Thunderbird as an add-on. That might be easier to revive for 21st century email.
http://www.staroceans.org/wiki/A/Eudora_OSE
https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/eudora_ose.html
vondur|3 months ago