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Open Source Technology

Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available To the Public (medium.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Computer History Museum (CHM), an institution which explores the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, announced on Tuesday the public release and long-term preservation of the Eudora source code, one of the early successful email clients, as part of its Center for Software History's Historical Source Code. The release comes after a five-year negotiation with Qualcomm. From the press release: The first version of Eudora was created in the 1980s by Steve Dorner who was working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It took Dorner over a year to create the first version of Eudora, which had 50,000 lines of C code and ran only on the Apple Macintosh. In 1991, Qualcomm licensed Eudora from the University of Illinois and distributed it free of charge. Qualcomm later released Eudora as a consumer product in 1993, and it quickly gained popularity. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of users. After 15 years, in 2006, Qualcomm decided that Eudora was no longer consistent with their other major project lines, and they stopped development. The discussion with Qualcomm for the release of the Eudora source code by the company's museum took five years. Len Shustek, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum, writes: Eventually many email clients were written for personal computers, but few became as successful as Eudora. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of happy users. Eudora was elegant, fast, feature-rich, and could cope with mail repositories containing hundreds of thousands of messages. In my opinion it was the finest email client ever written, and it has yet to be surpassed. I still use it today, but, alas, the last version of Eudora was released in 2006. It may not be long for this world. With thanks to Qualcomm, we are pleased to release the Eudora source code for its historical interest, and with the faint hope that it might be resuscitated. I will muse more about that later.
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Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available To the Public More

Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available To the Public

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  • My favorite mail client! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by llamalad ( 12917 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @04:24PM (#56655282)

    This was my favorite mail client back in the days of MacTCP on my Macintosh LC with my screaming-fast (and dirty cheap, and unreliable) 14.4 Linelink modem.

    • Penelope was Eudora OSE (the Open Source Edition)

      https://wiki.mozilla.org/Eudora_Releases

      since the Computer History Museum (CHM) now has the domain maybe they could restore the downloads / extensions ?

    • Eudora was a wonderfully powerful and adaptable email client for the Mac. I used it until about five years ago when it finally became unreliably flaky on the Mac. It had great sorting and filtering capabilities and let me make note on emails, which makes them much more useful for me by putting them in context. It's far more flexible than Apple Mail, but it was getting very flaky in dealing with HTML mail. There were some efforts to replicate it in open-source software, but I don't think they got anywhere.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjpaci ( 33725 )
        Wasn't there a section of preferences called "esoteric settings" which gave you some really focused control on mailbox behavior and the like.

  • If you just can't leave Eudora behind at the museum, try THE BAT! email client. Now certified for Windows 10!!

    https://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/ [ritlabs.com]

    • Not free? Not open sores? Not sure the relevance to this discussion, other than it also is an email client. May as well say "try Outlook!".

      • The BAT! was an Eudora clone back in the day. Like the Crackberry from the same era, people got use to a bad interface and found it difficult to switch over to something different.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You can also use Pegasus Mail [pmail.com], which is still being developed.

  • This is still my every day mail client. I feel like a fossil now ...

  • 'till the eagle screams (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So, Qualcomm had the copyright to a piece of software that hasn't been remotely relevant to anyone this century, and has been out of development for 12 years. There's nothing about that piece of software that could REMOTELY be interesting as IP. Sure, the implementation itself (like all source code) may be under copyright, but there's no way there's any commercial value, trade secrets, or anything else in there that's relevant enough to protect at this point.

    And yet they hold out for FIVE FLIPPIN' YEARS b

    • Re:'till the eagle screams (Score:4, Informative)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 ) on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @05:19PM (#56655566)

      It says Qualcomm LICENSED the first version from the University of Illinois, so it may not have been theirs to use 'common sense' and just 'give it away'. So at the very least they had to go back to the licenses and see what rights they had, and they probably had to get U of I to agree to the release. I am guessing doing those searches/negotiations was not real high on the priority list of anyone's legal department.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jonwil ( 467024 )

        They had to identify the copyright to every single line of code and where they didn't own it, either negotiation distribution rights or remove it completly. That takes time to do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjpaci ( 33725 )
      It's not like this would've been a high priority for Qualcomm and over those 5 years i'm quite certain these weren't daily Thomas Crowne-intense meetings.
  • Probably one of the few people left who still use it on a daily basis (ver 7.1.0.9)

    • Yup, me too. Just finished responding to quite a bit of today's email using it. I've tried migrating to something else, but it just doesn't work the way I want it to. Outlook is passable, except for it totally fails at things like breaking up quotes to inline responses, and there's no chance in hell of there ever being a native Linux client (and Win10 makes me want to totally abandon Windows more by the day - Eudora is one of the things holding me here). Thunderbird is likewise okayish, but sometimes it

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by YVRGeek ( 669881 )
        I posted above... I'm with you man. My C is pretty rusty but I can do UI / feature design and would very much be interested in doing testing, QA, etc. Eudora with it's MDI, unequalled search capability, MBOX format, filtering, and folder creation/transfer capabilities make it the best (IMHO) email client out there bar none. Tried the rest, stayed with the best.

        • I'll buy. [One time license, none of this 'subscription crap']

          I'm currently using Thunderbird and have been since Eudora. I mean, it's better than Webmail.

          But I would absolutely jump ship to a better, modern mail client.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by YVRGeek ( 669881 )
      Yup, me too (same version). I've tried several other email clients but nothing compares to Eudora IMHO still - even with it's deficiencies. The MDI interface, the easy (albeit at times klunky) filter creation, excellent multi-parameter search capability, MBOX format (excellent to train my Spamassassin on the mail server), easy folder creation and transferring, etc. etc. Yes, there are security concerns but not if you're careful and set things up correctly. If someone decides to take on the project of moder

  • There was a simple pattern match to see if you sent a flamewar email. I'm sure it was string matches and counting.

  • I supported a number of people who used the client. Many, maybe even most, insisted on calling it eNdora instead of eUdora. Never understood why that was so common or persistent.

  • Eudora? (Score:2)

    by Chuq ( 8564 )

    Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time....

  • According to the last email I received in it, I stopped using it on December 20, 2015. I still have it to dig through old emails, which I just did the other day. It stores mail in the MBOX format so I could theoretically read it in other software, but just as easy to use Eudora itself while I still can. It has a great, easy to use search function.

    I switched to Outlook because a majority of the emails I was starting to get weren't displaying properly. (MIME and HTML formatted emails.) I have outlook be

  • Where is that source code ??? I WANT IT !!!

  • For years I used the Eudora email client and the Eudora Internet Mail Server (EIMS). (unrelated code and origins) EIMS was a fairly simple, but rock-stable MTA that could run on very old hardware and even OS9. Spin it up and forget it. And its cost for unlimited users and domains ($200) made it an easy choice.

    I believe that one thing that kept EIMS focused on its core functions was that it was maintained by just one developer - Glenn Anderson. Time passed and Glenn got offers to do cgi work on movies like t

  • Eudora had useful features others still do not have. Finely detailed configuration of the UI, floating windows, access to the complete raw email, the "Who" column, detailed control of toolbars, separation of attachments from the messages (a seriously useful tool) and simple, powerful filtering and sorting.

    One feature that was very useful was Message Redirection which would discretely rewrite an email message to another recipient while making the message look like it came from the original sender.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Apple Mail had the "redirect" feature at least until Snow Leopard (they may have removed it in the iPhonification of the OS - I stopped using Macs after Snow Leopard). I think it inherited it from NeXT Mail.

  • Still using it to this day on Windows 10, with only a few minor quirks (including difficulty rendering some extended characters). I have found nothing else that meets one of my essential criteria: saving mail locally to my hard drive in RAW TEXT format, with individual files representing each folder i've created.

  • Nice to see that it's published under a liberal license. It'll be very cool if a derivative project catches on.

    Eudora on a Mac was the only graphical email program I ever used. I switched to pine when I replaced MacOS with Linux, and switched to mutt not long after. But I have to admit, Eudora was super nice when I was using it.

    Interesting that the Mac and Windows versions are completely different products. Different programming languages altogether. Also interesting that the Mac version is 70 MB while the

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