Eudora (e-mail client)

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Eudora
Developed by	Qualcomm
Latest release	7.1 (Windows), 6.2.4 (Mac OS) / October 11, 2006
Preview release	8.0b3 / 22 February 2008
OS	Windows, Mac OS, Mac OS X
Genre	E-mail
License	Adware, payware, Light; Free software (Eudora 8.0+/Penelope)
Website	www.eudora.com

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". ^[1] 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.

1 History
- 1.1 Opening the source
2 Problems when using UTF-8 character set
3 Problems regarding S/MIME digital signatures
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

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 ^[2] 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" ^[3]. 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.

The Qualcomm Penelope developers announced on July 19, 2007: "We currently have, in house, our first actual Beta build (called Eudora 8.0.0b1). We'll probably get this posted in the next few weeks." This open-source, Thunderbird-based version has been under development since 2006, but will not be a true replacement for the current Eudora (ie., one that has similar features/capabilities) until 2008 at the earliest. [1]

"UPDATE (8/31/07): OK, so it took a bit longer than expected, but the first beta release is now available."[2] "The first BETA release of Penelope (Eudora 8.0.0b1) is now available for download."[3]

(17DEC2007) The latest beta release of Eudora, version 8.0.0b2 (which includes the Penelope extension version 0.1a22) was made available for download.

Problems when using UTF-8 character set

Regarding the Eudora 7.0 release and earlier (the new, open-source Eudora 8 no longer has this problem!)
Despite the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommendation^[4] that all email programs must be able to display and create mail using UTF-8, Eudora had the dubious "distinction" of being the only major mail client left in the market that does not support it. Users of languages that are covered by ISO8859-1 may profit from the freeware plugin UTF8ISO, which decodes many UTF-8 characters to ISO8859-1 ones which can be handled by Eudora. Another solution for Windows users is using a freeware converter MIME-Proxy [4] that converts between a chosen, locally used character set and the charset of the e-mail. This program has the advantage that it is not limited to ISO-8859-1 on the user’s end.

Problems regarding S/MIME digital signatures

Older versions of Eudora were unable to read the S/MIME digital signature enclosed in email messages, although this is a standard rfc-documented feature most current email clients support. However, a plugin is now freely available ^[5] which adds complete S/MIME capability to both Eudora 6.x and 7.x versions for Microsoft Windows (although not for the Mac OS versions).