This is a sad day for those of us who have used Eudora for the last decade (or more) and love its particular functionality.

This is the death of Eudora.

"Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before."

That is such an incredibly deep quote, it could not have possibly have been uttered or written by one human being. I mean, it totally covers all the bases, says all the write things, respects all the important stake-holders. Jesus Christ toasted into a bagel it is just the perfect corporate press release comment!

Eudora had the best attachment management system I've seen when it was free. I hope when it gets into the open source and updated it maintains that. Other e-mail programs are only beginning to catch up.

I have used Eudora as my primary email client since 1995. The way things are set up in Eudora make very good sense to how my brain percievs they should be set up.

I was a dedicated Eudora user for over 15 years, until they started dropping the ball on keeping it current. The last straw was when Apple Mail did Secure IMAP more reliably than Eudora.

This looks like a very good thing for Eudora. Maybe its UI will be brought into the current century. Maybe Eudora's release notes will no longer contain thinly-veiled insults against the Mac OS. Maybe it will render HTML properly (whether you like HTML email or not, when you receive it, it ought to look right). And there won't be any more ads.

Maybe I'll even start using it again.

Perhaps I'm missing what you mean on that one.

The problem I've always had with Eudora is that it uses absolute file paths rather than relative file paths for its attachments, which is a real pain. It caused all kinds of problem when we migrated from OS 9 to OS X, and it continues to create problems when people switch from PC to Mac or vice-versa.

I personally quit using Eudora when, after they FINALLY had a working OS X version, in the release notes one of the developers threw a little hissy fit and wrote something like, "Had to change the way blah-blah works because of how Mac OSuX handles something-or-other." Very unprofessional.

>That is such an incredibly deep quote, it could not have possibly have been >uttered or written by one human being.

Ordinarily, quotes in press releases are written by PR flacks, and the quotee may get to "approve" them if he or she is lucky. That one, however, is all mine--may this Jesus guy forgive me from his toasted bagel, assuming he hasn't been smothered by the cream cheese.

Steve Dorner

Of course, the "cross-platform codebase" is good from the point of view of the software company since it enables it to have a presence on more platforms and to offer a familiar experience to people moving from one platform to another.

But many OS X users were hoping for new version 7 Eudora written specifically for their platform using Cocoa and the Aqua interface - something that was scheduled to be out long ago, that kept slipping further and further away -

http://aldoblog.com/blog/549

- and that has now vanished permanently.

I like Thunderbird and have used it on Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, my preferred client on OS X is Apple's Mail. Thunderbird does not look right on OS X, and cannot take advantage of the system-wide stuff freely-available to any Cocoa app - such as spell-checking in any text-field or the Services Menu. And while non-Cocoa apps *can* get access to the Services Menu with a little more trouble, I don't suppose anyone would do this with a "cross-platform" application since doing so would break the similarity of behavior across different platforms.

Similarly, when using a non-native application one has to give up the system address book: Thunderbird does not use the WAB on Windows or Address Book on Mac; it has its own. And it does not use OS X's keychain. Nor can it send from iPhoto. And so on ...

Giving up Apple's Address Book would be particularly onerous.

1. It syncs flawlessly with my Nokia 3650.

2. Thunderbird's address book doesn't even have the facility to accept standard vCards:

http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcardoverview.html

I hope that the Eudora developers will improve Thunderbird, and I'm sure they will. But something that isn't written specifically for the platform, taking advantage of that platform's technologies, and integrated with it in important ways will surely always be lacking in some regards.

(I'm now a REGISTERED user. Whoopee!)

I understand your hesitation on platform-specific features. One of the things that the Thunderbird developers are excited about is that we are bringing more mac-heads to the codebase. They have specifically mentioned interest in bridges to things like the address book and spotlight. Mozilla *does* use platform-specific widgets when possible, and is looking to expand the support.

Interesting that you say "cocoa and the aqua interface", given that Apple itself hardly uses Aqua any more. (This is not a snipe at you, just an observation that Apple's UI standards are not as strong as they once were.)

Will the open source version of Eudora be as chocolaty as Eudora2 would have been? No. But, unlike Eudora2, it's going to exist. And we do intend to push the boundaries on OS integration, even if it means some differences across platforms.

Nothing's perfect.