Eudora (email Client) - Eudora OSE

Eudora OSE

On October 11, 2006, QUALCOMM Incorporated and the Mozilla Foundation announced that future versions of Eudora would be based on the Mozilla Thunderbird platform and be open source. The 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. Eudora, although based on Open Source Thunderbird software, is not wholly open source.

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

On July 2, 2010, the name was changed to Eudora OSE (Open Source Edition) and the version number was reset to 1.0 when it was released. From the beta 1.0 release candidate 1 readme.txt:

Beta versions of Eudora OSE were originally named just Eudora with a version number of 8.0. This caused some confusion in that some users expected the new version to be a regular update to Classic Eudora. Since Eudora OSE uses an entirely different code base from Classic Eudora, in an effort to reduce the confusion the application was renamed to Eudora OSE (Open Source Edition). The version number was also reset to 1.0, which has the added benefit that it is synchronized with the Penelope version number.

The first release version of Eudora OSE 1.0 became available on September 13, 2010. Since that time, all activity and development has ceased and developers continue to ignore queries about future updates much less the future of Eudora.

Eudora OSE does not retain the original mbox data structure, which stores all attachments as individual files together in one folder. It uses the same modern mbox file used by Apple Mail and others. No software is currently developed/supported that can access old Eudora mail archives directly, without import/conversion.

Many Eudora users disliked the direction Penelope took. Similarly, reception to Eudora OSE continues to be lukewarm months after the release. As it stands, the intended updates, to be released in parallel with new Thunderbird releases, have not materialized and continue to lead to frustration and disappointment in the Eudora community. Rather than make pronouncements and calling Eudora "Open Source", it is more correct to call it limited Open Source. The source code to Eudora OSE cannot be downloaded in any form and this project is considered dead since authors at Qualcomm, who have long since ceased working on Eudora OSE, do not respond to user questions about the project.

This does not constitute a classic OSE scenario for an expired product. (i.e. Eudora 7's complete and actual code being made available for GPL or OSE development by a community of users). This is however identical to the Netscape Gecko transition, eventually resulting in Firefox.

Instead Thunderbird is given a Eudora skin, leaving the entire back-end to be Thunderbird/Mozilla. Part of Eudora's popularity was arguably the ease with which utilities could be built for it. This encouraged users and businesses to adapt it to a variety of integrated solutions. Thunderbird's backend is incompatible with these utilities, but has a well-documented, non-proprietary API of its own for creating plugins and utilities.