I’ve been surprised recently to run into committed Eudora users, even after all these years. I did some poking around on the web and, it’s not obvious at first glance exactly who is supporting this product these days. But there are apparently still current releases. Or are there? The Wikipedia article about Eudora begins, “Eudora is a defunct email client…” But some of our own Brigada users seem diehard — and enduring. I was a committed Eudora user back in the day (the mid-90’s?). The web was young and we were mostly text-based. Not sure what left it behind, exactly. Outlook? But wow… Eudora was fast and furious. Anyone have a testimony as to why they keep using it, in spite of the rumor that it’s “defunct?” If so, please click “Comment” after the web version of this item. And thanks in advance for sharing your story.
I started using Eudora when it was a commercial product many years ago. Surprisingly it still meets all my needs. I have a complete record of my email correspondence since 1998 for offline access. I appreciate the simplicity and also the fact that I can put the program on a thumbdrive or transfer it to another computer without having to reinstall anything. I am often in places without internet access, so having everything offline is non-negotiable. BTW, my DTP of choice is Lotus WorPro :) It does things even the latest MS Word won’t do.
Awesome Paul. Love it.
I used Eudora only briefly, and never as my primary email client. To me, the user interface was always quirky — some people really liked it, but I think it was difficult for many.
One thing that I liked about Eudora was that it was non-standard in how it handled downloading of messages. In the POP protocol, the signal to delete copies of downloaded messages from a server is normally sent only after all the available messages are downloaded. In the era of dial-up connections, this was occasionally a problem if you had a large batch of downloads and an unreliable connection. If a connection got interrupted, you would have to reconnect, and because the the download was incomplete (and the delete signal not sent), the result was having to re-download stuff you had already seen. A real annoyance, especially if one of the waiting messages had a big file attachment.
Eudora was good for this kind of problem, because it would send a delete signal following each downloaded message.
The key thing about “defunct” was that Qualcomm quit developing it — I think they never got the economics worked out, of trying to derive revenue from a commercial version (or ad-delivery in a “sponsored” version).
There was, for a while, an attempt to continue to develop Eudora as user interface running on top of Mozilla Thunderbird, but it seemed to be half-hearted, and I never heard anything about it, than it existed. The Wikipedia page indicates that that project was abandoned in 2010.
If you know where to look (especially in the repositories that specialize in old software), it’s not hard to find downloadable copies of Eudora. From a perspective of feature sets, there haven’t been a lot of advances in email in the last decade (which is why Mozilla shifted a significant portion of its developers away from Thunderbird, a couple of years ago). For the most part, Email is a mature application, and there’s not a lot of new and exciting things that you can add. Even for Outlook, there haven’t been a lot of changes over the years, and a lot of what does go into Outlook is not changes to email functionality, but the other personal information management tools (contacts list, calendar, task lists), and things that integrate with Microsoft enterprise infrastructure (especially Exchange and OneNote servers).
I don’t know a lot of people that were using Eudora, but I think that a lot of the users are likely to have shifted to either Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird, since both are/were free.
However, the major problem with using Eudora is that since the code is no longer being maintained, there aren’t any security fixes being issued, and it’s been abandoned for enough years that I’m sure that there’s a significant number of holes in it. Although the recent disclosures of bugs such as Heartbleed, Shellshock and POODLE are essentially server-related, Eudora is old enough that it’s probable that there are similar bugs that haven’t been fixed.
For what it’s worth, there is one other mail client from that era that continues to be under development, Pegasus. That one has a single developer, and several years ago, when he indicated that he was stopping development, there were enough Pegasus users that raised sufficient funding to keep him going.
Yep;, still using Eudora. I like the number of mailboxes it can handle .. filters work well …I’ve built up my own spam filtering within the program. It has a few incompatibilities with some current email clients, but not important. … By the way, there is a current windows version of Eudora. A little different, but it’s okay.
I began using Eudora in the early 90’s when my son was a computer major in college and promoted it to me. I have 2 other commercial accounts for business work but I don’t care for them. Too many easy to use features with Eudora I don’t want to give up. Wish it were supported.
I have been using Eudora since its early versions in 96 and still continue to do till today. I just can’t live without it. Eudora is installed on all my PC and laptops. I had lived with this programme since win 3.1 days. Now my current version is 7.1.0.9 and still going strong on my win7 and win8.