Eudora (e-mail client)

Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS. The software was named after Eudora Welty because of her short story "Why I Live at the Post Office". Eudora was developed by Steve Dorner in 1988 who worked at the Computer Services Organization of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Eudora was acquired by Qualcomm in 1991. In 2006 Qualcomm stopped development of the commercial version, and sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based on Mozilla Thunderbird code-named Penelope.

History

Originally distributed freely, Eudora was commercialized and offered in a Light (freeware) and Pro (commercial) product. It is now distributed in "Sponsored mode" (adware).

Eudora (6.0.1) added support for Bayesian filtering of spam with a feature called SpamWatch. Eudora (6.2) added a scam watch feature that flags suspicious links within e-mails in an attempt to thwart phishing. Eudora (7.0) added Ultra-Fast Search, which finds any emails using single or multiple criteria in seconds.

Eudora has support for 'Stationery', a standard message or reply prepared ahead of time to a common question. Eudora stores e-mails in the mbox format, which uses plain text files instead of a database as Microsoft Outlook does. This allows the user to back up portions of their e-mail correspondence without backing up the entire database.

Eudora supports the POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols. Eudora also has support for SSL and S/MIME authentication, allowing users to sign or encrypt email communications for greatest security.

At one time, Eudora also offered a webmail version at eudoramail.com. This service was run by Lycos as part of Mailcity, later renamed Lycos Mail. As of 2006, Eudoramail addresses for users still work (and are redirected to Lycos Mail accounts), but new users cannot sign up for the service.

Opening the source

On October 11, 2006, Qualcomm announced that future versions of Eudora would be based on the same technology platform as Mozilla Thunderbird and be open source. The current codename for this project is "Penelope" . Penelope is developed by the Mozilla Foundation, and the project is being led by the former Qualcomm team, including original developer Steve Dorner.

Penelope is currently available as an extension to Mozilla Thunderbird. The Paid mode commercial version of Eudora is no longer available as of May 1st, 2007. The Light/Sponsored mode versions of Eudora continue to be available for download.

On July 19, 2007 the developers announced the first official Beta build (called Eudora 8.0.0b1), and published a roadmap of the planned progress. Until now, the project is still in beta stage.

References

See also

• Comparison of e-mail clients

External links

• Eudora
• Penelope - MozillaWiki