by , 10:15 AM EDT, September 4th, 2007

The first public beta of the Eudora 8 email client application was officially released this week. The new version is based on the open source Thunderbird email applications, but retains many of the features found in older versions of Eudora.

Eudora 8 and its new Thunderbird look.

Although it is a public beta, this is the first update to Eudora since it was handed of to the Mozilla Foundation from Qualcomm. The development team is seeking user feedback, and will be making changes as the application works its way out of beta testing.

Since Eudora 8 is a beta application, it should not be used for mission critical work.

Eudora 8.0.0b1 is available as a free download at the Mozilla Web site.