 Eudora 7.1.0.9 (released 2006) in Windows | |
| Developer(s) | Team HERMES Historically: UIUC;Qualcomm |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 8.0 alpha 30c (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) |
| Preview release | 8.0 alpha 30c (Windows) |
| Operating system | Windows,Linux Historically: Classic Mac OS,Mac OS X,Linux[1] |
| Type | Email (IMAP andSMTP client) |
| License | BSD License; earlier:Free software (Eudora OSE),Adware,payware, Lightwww |
| Website | www |
Eudora (/juːˈdɔːrə/ ⓘ) is a family ofemail clients that was used on theclassic Mac OS,Mac OS X, andMicrosoft Windowsoperating systems. It also supported severalpalmtop computing platforms, includingNewton and thePalm OS.
The final Macintosh and Windows versions of Eudora, released in 2006, were succeeded by theQualcomm-backed,cross-platform Eudora OSE (q.v.), built on an unrelatedcodebase (namely that ofMozilla 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 wereopen-sourced andpreserved as anartefact by theComputer History Museum[2] in 2018; as part of the preservation, the CHM assumed ownership of the Eudora trademark.
The only actively maintainedfork of the software, known asEudoramail as of June 2024, originated from 'mainline' Eudora for Windows as preserved by the CHM.Hermes, its maintainers, described Eudoramail 8.0 as currently being in alpha; Wellington typographerJack Yan, meanwhile, points out its stability, a number of well-characterised and reproducible display bugs notwithstanding.[3] As of December 2024, the website is down.
Eudora was developed in 1988 bySteve Dorner, who worked at the Computer Services Organization of theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[4] The software was named after American authorEudora 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 theClassic Mac OS only.[8]
Eudora was acquired byQualcomm in 1991. Qualcomm produced a visually and functionally similaranalogue, 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 andC++), 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 ofwebmail services, Qualcomm licensed the Eudora trademark to WhoWhere? (later acquired byLycos); 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 also ceased development of the 'mainline' version of Eudora for Windows (in all its forms: adware, freeware, and commercial).
Rather than devote continued resources to the development of aloss leader product,[9][10] Qualcomm instead sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based onMozilla Thunderbird, code-named Penelope, later renamed to Eudora OSE. Development of the open-source version stopped in 2010 and was officiallydeprecated in 2013, with users advised to switch to the current version of Thunderbird.
On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, theComputer History Museum acquired full ownership of thesource 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 theBSDopen source license. The Eudora source code distributed by the Computer History Museum is the same except for the addition of the new license, code sanitization of profanity within its comments, and the removal of third-party software whose distribution rights had long expired.[2]
In August 2018, a "small team" started working on patching thelacunae in the Eudora code, in order to render it usable on modern systems. According to the initial posting on the eudora-win[Note 1] mailing list, the intent was to decouple entirely from Stingray Desktop, a proprietary library designed for constructinggraphical user interfaces under Windows. Originally, Stingray Desktop was known as Objective Toolkit and was developed by Stingray Software (which was acquired on March 3, 1998 byRogue Wave[11]); as of 2024, it is produced byPerforce.[12] The rationale was that this would allow the mail client (named simply "Hermes Mail" at the time) to be fully open source.
Likewise, Eudora for Windows 7.1.0.9 (the final version released by Qualcomm) leveragedMicrosoftTrident as itsbrowser engine (i.e.HTML renderer), a software component deprecated by Microsoft in favour ofEdgeHTML as of 2018; the latter would be superseded in turn byBlink. Replacing Trident was part of the project's strategy at the outset and, as of June 2024, remains so (see "Features",infra).
During the time it had been under Qualcomm management, Eudora for Windows had never implemented support forcharacter encoding, and had instead been hardcoded to declare every e-mail message sent as encodediso-8859-1 (irrespective of the actual content) and to display every incoming message using the system encoding (one of the Windows encodings, depending on the language version of the system). Even before 2006, this created problems for users corresponding in languages other than Western European ones; later on, asUTF-8 became more and more popular, it became a problem for everyone without exception.
Finally, Eudora 7.1.0.9 and earlier predated theHeartbleed vulnerability and thus refused to negotiate securely usingTransport Layer Security with servers that implemented the security patch; they also did not include a modernroot certificate store. Therefore, some users had resorted to tunnelling withstunnel as a workaround[13][14] while others simply trusted the offending certificates manually.[15]
It was determined that the three former problems had to be remedied in theexecutable code of the mail client itself, but that the latter could be patched by replacing twodynamic-link libraries and the root-certificate store. Accordingly, pre-production of the mail client (which underwent a rebrand, first from "Hermes Mail" to the project codename "Aurora", and subsequently to "Eudoramail") involved the release of the so-called "HERMES SSL Extensions", also under anopen source licence.
Eudoramail itself began development on 17 June 2019, usingPerforce's Stingray user-interface toolkit, "no matter how distasteful we find that to be", a decision the developers felt was justified "given our talents, circumstances and limitations", notwithstanding the estimated outlay (between $2,800 and $3,600).[16] On 31 March 2022, it was announced that "HERMES Mail is on the launchpad and final preparations are made for liftoff",[17] with the initial alpha of Eudoramail 8.0 being released on Aug 1 2022.[6] At the time, the stated policy was that it would be a soft launch, with the release being phased in first for testers, then for users on theeudora-win mailing list on the Clio ListMoms Cartel,[18] and finally for the public at large.
Eudora 6.0.1 added support forBayesian filtering ofspam with a feature calledSpamWatch. Eudora 6.2 added ascam watch feature that flags suspicious links within emails in an attempt to thwartphishing. Eudora 7.0 addedIndexed search (powered byX1 Discovery), which finds any emails using single or multiple criteria in seconds; due to lack of legal permissions, this feature is missing in Eudoramail 8.0 (unless a customer already has an existing copy ofx1lib.dll , which can be placed into the program directory to restore X1 functionality).
Eudora has support for "stationery", a standard message or reply prepared ahead of time to a common question. Eudora stores emails in amodified mbox format (*.mbx), which uses plaintext files instead of a database asMicrosoft Outlook does. This allows the user to back up portions of their email correspondence without backing up the entiredatabase.
Eudora supports thePOP3,IMAP andSMTP protocols. Eudora also has support for SSL and, in Windows,S/MIME authentication, allowing users to sign orencrypt 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 usingx-eudora-settingURIs that must be pasted into a message and clicked.[19]
At least two third-party plugins exist that can convert characters that also exist in iso-8859-1, and it is 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.[20][21]