And personally, good riddance! I could never, ever stand Eudora as a mail client, I found the way it handled mailboxes prone to error, inconsistent, and unintuitive, and I found the way it handles configurations bulky and clunky, and I thought it’s silly “hot pepper” method of flagging messages with “heated language” in it a silly feature whose development time could have gone towards coming up with a better way to handle attachments, IMAP caching, and make the interface something that didn’t scream Windows 3.11. But that’s just my opinion.

And I’m vindicated! The developers of Eudora have officially announced its death-I mean, that they’re planning on ending the development of the commercial version of the software that’s been draining money from institutions for far too long through site licenses and a user-base that swears by Eudora as if it were their first born child. Seriously, Eudora fans would probably poke holes in all of the points I made above, and they absolutely adore their favorite mailer, even if its impossible to troubleshoot and support. Still, Qualcomm has made its declaration, and the very least thing that it could do, the right thing to do, is exactly what it’s doing: Eudora will live on as an open-source application:

In a surprise announcement today, Qualcomm says it will be ceasing development of the commercial version of the once-popular Eudora mail client. In its stead, the company says it will collaborate with the Mozilla Foundation and base future versions of Eudora on Mozilla Thunderbird. The release of the open source Eudora is scheduled for the first half of 2007.

This is absolutely the best thing that they could do. Qualcomm could learn a lot from the Mozilla Foundation about how to make a decent mail client (and I’m not just saying that because Thunderbird is my mail client of choice) and the Mozilla Foundation could learn a lot about feature inclusion and expansion from the Eudora folks at Qualcomm. This could be an interesting partnership.

[ Newsforge :: Eudora is Dead, Long Live Eudora ]