Moore: Latest Beta of Eudora 8 is Not Ready For Prime Time

by , 5:05 PM EST, February 25th, 2008

Charles Moore has been a user of Eudora since it first came out, much more than a decade ago. In his review of the latest beta of Eudora 8 at Lowendmac on Monday, Mr. Moore was skeptical, given the rate of progress, that the new hybrid e-mail client will ever come close to equaling the original product.

"For those of us who are dedicated Eudora email client users, the announcement that Qualcomm would terminate development of our beloved email client and hand off the name to the Mozilla organization for the purpose of development of an Open Source Eudora email client was cause for both anticipation and apprehension," Mr. Moore reported.

"The more ominous part was that the new Eudora was to be based on Mozilla's Thunderbird email client, which I have never been favorably impressed by for a whole raft of reasons."

Mr. Moore recounted how when the first beta came out, he eagerly downloaded it and started to put it through its paces. The first thing he noticed, however, was that the lineage to Thunderbird is not well concealed. In fact, Mr. Moore declared it an annoyance. "It's going to take a lot more than Thunderbird with Eudora icons and menu category names tacked on to make me a willing adopter of Eudora 8 and beyond. However, I tried not to be too negative, and there were a few good things about Eudora 8.0.0b1," he wrote.

There were also some positive things to point out for beta 3, and Mr Moore is always careful to provide a balanced review of anything he encounters. In this case, however, the long-time Eudora user wasn't satisfied.

"Eudora 8.0b3 represents some incremental progress, but it has a very, very long way to go yet if it's even going to come close to being a halfway-satisfactory replacement for classic Eudora. I remain skeptical that it will ever be," Mr. Moore concluded.