10.15.06
Long slow farewell to Eudora
Yesterday, Qualcomm announced that they were going to cease selling Eudora. I have really mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it’s great that Thunderbird is going to get the Eudora team’s help to add features and overhaul stuff. I really like Eudora, so it will be nice to see some of Eudora’s features coming Thunderbird’s way.
On the other hand, I am very sad to see the passing of yet another email client. There were precious few consumer-grade email clients as it was — Outlook, Lotus, GMail, Yahoo Mail, Eudora, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird* — and now there is one fewer. I think that the existing email user interfaces have a lot of room for improvement, and worry that the field will lose some vitality with the loss of Eudora.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope the movement of Eudora users to Thunderbird will help drive Thunderbird to even wider acceptance.
*I have heard people raving about The Bat, but I’m not a Windows user, so don’t have an opinion on it. Mulberry had good intentions, but I think it fell short in some significant ways. (Other people did as well — its parent company went bankrupt and Mulberry’s future is somewhat sketchy.) OSAF might someday release Chandler and it might someday be cool, but it’s still not ready.
