User:Edward Werner/sandbox
 Eudora 7.1.0.9 (released 2006) in Windows | |
| Developer(s) | UIUC (formerly); Qualcomm (formerly); Team HERMES |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 7.1 (Windows); 6.2.4 (Mac OS X); 6.1.1 (Mac OS 9)
/ 2004-05-18 (Mac OS 9); 2006-10-11 (Windows/Mac OS X) |
| Operating system | Windows, Classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, Linux[1] |
| Type | |
| License | BSD License; earlier: Free software (Eudora OSE), Adware, payware, Light |
| Website | www |
Eudora /juːˈdɔːrə/ is a family of email clients that was used on the classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supported several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS.
The final Macintosh and Windows versions of Eudora, released in 2006, were succeeded by the Qualcomm-backed, cross-platform Eudora OSE (q.v.), built on an unrelated codebase (viz. that of Mozilla Thunderbird) with additional extensions. The first and last version of Eudora OSE was released in 2010 to negative reviews and lukewarm support; development subsequently ceased due to a lack of funding.
The last 'mainline' (pre-OSE) versions of Eudora for Mac and Windows were open-sourced and preserved as an artefact by the Computer History Museum[2] in 2018; as part of the preservation, the CHM assumed ownership of the Eudora trademark.
The actively maintained version of the software, known as Eudoramail as of June 2024, originates from 'mainline' Eudora for Windows as preserved by the CHM. Hermes, its current maintainers, describe Eudoramail 8.0 as currently being in alpha; Wellington typographer Jack Yan, meanwhile, points out its stability, notwithstanding a number of well-characterised and reproducible display bugs.[3]
History
[edit]Pre-Qualcomm
[edit]Eudora was developed in 1988 by Steve Dorner, who worked at the Computer Services Organization of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[4] The software was named after American author Eudora Welty, because of her short story "Why I Live at the P.O.";[5][6] Dorner rearranged the title to form the slogan "Bringing the P.O. to Where You Live" for his software.[7] Although he regretted naming it after the still-living author because he thought doing so was "presumptuous", Welty was reportedly "pleased and amused" by Dorner's tribute.[7] This original, UIUC incarnation of Eudora was compatible with Classic Mac OS only[8].
The Qualcomm years
[edit]Eudora was acquired by Qualcomm in 1991. Qualcomm produced a visually and functionally similar analogue, though the resemblance was merely superficial. Until the birth-cum-death of Eudora OSE, the Mac and Windows programs were developed by different teams at Qualcomm, in different programming languages (C and C++), and had different milestones.[2]
The software was originally distributed free of charge; in response to management pressure[8], Eudora was later commercialized and offered as a Light (freeware) and Pro (commercial) product. Between 2003 and 2006 the full-featured Pro version was also available as a "Sponsored mode" (adware) distribution.
In 1995, in response to the rise of webmail services, Qualcomm licensed the Eudora trademark to WhoWhere? (later acquired by Lycos); this service operated until 2006, when the eudoramail.com domain ceased accepting new accounts and existing accounts were reintegrated into Lycos Mail.
In 2006, Qualcomm ceased development of the commercial version and sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based on Mozilla Thunderbird, code-named Penelope, later renamed to Eudora OSE. Development of the open-source version stopped in 2010 and was officially deprecated in 2013, with users advised to switch to the current version of Thunderbird.
Source code release
[edit]On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, the Computer History Museum acquired full ownership of the source code, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and domain names. The transfer agreement from Qualcomm also allowed the Computer History Museum to publish the source code under the BSD open source license. The Eudora source code distributed by the Computer History Museum is the same except for the addition of the new license, sanitization of "bad words" found mostly in comment sections of the code and the removal of third-party software that neither the museum nor Qualcomm had the right to distribute.[2]
Under Hermes
[edit]In 2018, a "small team" started working on repairing Eudora to update it for modern use, using crowd funding to facilitate their effort, at the time branded as Hermes Mail.[citation needed]
Initial focus was "a 'software bridge' to mediate between QUALCOMM Eudora 7 for Windows and modern OpenSSL" in response to the Heartbleed vulnerability and resulted in the release of updated cryptographic DLL files.[citation needed]
Under Qualcomm management, Eudora for Windows never implemented support for character encoding and was hardcoded to declare every email sent as encoded iso-8859-1, regardless of the actual content, and displayed every incoming email using the system encoding (one of the Windows encodings, depending on the language version of the system).
This created problems for users corresponding in languages other than Western European ones and, later on, for everybody as UTF-8 became more and more popular.
Features
[edit]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 emails 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 emails in a modified mbox format (*.mbx), which uses plain text files instead of a database as Microsoft Outlook does. This allows the user to back up portions of their email correspondence without backing up the entire database.
Eudora supports the POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols. Eudora also has support for SSL and, in Windows, S/MIME authentication, allowing users to sign or encrypt email communications for greatest security.
Eudora is noteworthy for its extensive variety of settings to customize its behavior, many of which are not available in the user interface but are accessed using x-eudora-setting URIs that must be pasted into a message and clicked.[9]
Third-Party Plugins
[edit]At least two third-party plugins exist that can convert characters that also exist in iso-8859-1, and it's also possible to run it with "Mime-proxy", but depending on a specific user's needs and due in part to the internal limitations of Eudora they may only offer a partial solution.[10][11]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ "Eudora Releases". mozilla.org. Retrieved September 28, 2015.
- ^ a b c "The Eudora Email Client Source Code". www.computerhistory.org. May 22, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2018.
- ^ Yan, Jack (April 6, 2024). "Eudora users, welcome Aurora: finally, a modern, secure, Unicode-friendly successor". Retrieved June 17, 2024.
- ^ "[appletalk] Re: PopMail+GatorBox+MacTCP". comp.archives. July 3, 1990. USENET posting with Steve Dorner's announcement of Eudora.
- ^ "Eudora Welty: Why I Live at the P.O." art-bin.com. Retrieved September 28, 2015.
- ^ Eudora Background Documents (Internet Archive copy)
- ^ a b Thomas, Jo (January 21, 1997). "For Inventor of Eudora, Great Fame, No Fortune". The New York Times. Retrieved September 28, 2015.
- ^ a b Dr R. Yeap (February 27, 2021). Eudora Interview with Steve, John and Jeff. Retrieved June 16, 2024 – via YouTube.
- ^ X-Eudora-Settings URIs (Internet Archive copy)
- ^ "UTF8ISO for Eudora - English documentation". windharp.de. Retrieved September 28, 2015.
- ^ "Greek Message Viewer". www.drivehq.com. Retrieved October 2, 2015.
External links
[edit]- Classic Eudora – latest copy available at the Wayback Machine (archived August 23, 2014)
- Pandora Mail, an e-mail client intended to replicate the functionality of Eudora
- Hermes Messenger - open source fork of Eudora