Talk about the end of an era.
Terry pointed this one out:
Qualcomm on Wednesday joined up with the Mozilla Foundation to announce it is transitioning Eudora into an open source e-mail client that will be based upon Thunderbird. In turn, all future versions of Eudora will be free and Qualcomm will discontinue the current paid client.
Although it may seem like Eudora is simply abandoning its e-mail software, which has a small but strong following of loyal users, the company claims the Thunderbird-based client will retain “Eudora’s uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements.”
Technorati Tags: email, open-source
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Yeah. According to John Gruber, they’re taking the base Thunderbird client and adding some of the Eudora feature set – rather than transitioning the existing Eudora codebase.
This has been a long, painful road that surprised nobody. Eudora was once the top-end mail client, but never really made the transition from the old days of POP servers and almost-nonexistent spam – let along MacOS 9 to OSX. The adoption of IMAP, and POP/IMAP over SSL was poor, and they lagged behind other programs in anti-spam functionality
I think the only real surprise is that the product wasn’t just entirely discontinued – and one wonders if that has anything to do with the programs roots and history as a project of academia,,,