Eudora () is a family of
email clients
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.
A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...
that was used on the
classic Mac OS
Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...
,
Mac OS X
macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
, and
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...
s. It also supported several
palmtop
A handheld computer, also called a palmtop computer, is a term that has variously been used to describe a small-sized personal computer (PC) typically built around a clamshell design, clamshell form factor and a laptop-like Computer keyboard, keyb ...
computing platforms, including
Newton and the
Palm OS
Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) is a discontinued mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. ...
.
The final Macintosh and Windows versions of Eudora, released in 2006, were succeeded by the
Qualcomm
Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...
-backed,
cross-platform
Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...
Eudora OSE (q.v.), built on an unrelated
codebase
In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code system files; thu ...
(namely that of
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client that also functions as a personal information manager with a Digital calendar, calendar and contactbook, as well as an RSS feed reader, chat client (IRC/XMPP/Matrix (protocol), Matrix), ...
) 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 were
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
d and
preserved as an
artefact by the
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...
in 2018; as part of the preservation, the CHM assumed ownership of the Eudora trademark.
The only actively maintained
fork
In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to h ...
of the software, known as Eudoramail as of June 2024, originates from 'mainline' Eudora for Windows as preserved by the CHM. Hermes, its current maintainers, describe Eudoramail 8.0 as currently being in alpha; Wellington typographer
Jack Yan
Jack Yan (; born 1972) is a New Zealand publisher, designer and businessman. He is best known as the founder and publisher of ''Lucire''.
He ran for mayor of Wellington in 2010, and again in 2013, but was unsuccessful in both elections.
Backgr ...
, meanwhile, points out its stability, a number of well-characterised and reproducible display bugs notwithstanding.
History
Pre-Qualcomm (1988–1991)
Eudora was developed in 1988 by
Steve Dorner, who worked at the Computer Services Organization of the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...
. The software was named after American author
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short-story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel '' The Optimist's Daughter'' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerou ...
, because of her short story "
Why I Live at the P.O.";
[Eudora Background Documents](_blank)
(Internet Archive copy) Dorner rearranged the title to form the slogan "Bringing the P.O. to Where You Live" for his software.
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.
This original UIUC incarnation of Eudora was compatible with the
Classic Mac OS
Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...
only.
Qualcomm years and first Windows version (1991–2006)
Eudora was acquired by
Qualcomm
Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...
in 1991. Qualcomm produced a visually and functionally similar
analogue, 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 and
C++), and had different milestones.
The software was originally distributed free of charge; in response to management pressure,
Eudora was later commercialized and offered as a Light (
freeware
Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...
) and Pro (commercial) product. Between 2003 and 2006 the full-featured Pro version was also available as a "Sponsored mode" (
adware
Adware, often called advertising-supported software by its developers, is software that generates revenue by automatically displaying Online advertising, online advertisements in the user interface or on a screen presented during the installatio ...
) distribution.
In 1995, in response to the rise of
webmail
Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Additionally, many internet service providers (ISP) prov ...
services, Qualcomm licensed the Eudora trademark to WhoWhere? (later acquired by
Lycos
Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company ...
); 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).
Hiatus and source code release (2006–2025)
Rather than devote continued resources to the development of a
loss leader
A loss leader (also leader) is a pricing strategy where a product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services. With this sales promotion/marketing strategy, a "leader" is any popular artic ...
product, Qualcomm instead sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based on
Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client that also functions as a personal information manager with a Digital calendar, calendar and contactbook, as well as an RSS feed reader, chat client (IRC/XMPP/Matrix (protocol), Matrix), ...
, code-named Penelope, later renamed to Eudora OSE. Development of the open-source version stopped in 2010 and was officially
deprecated
Deprecation is the discouragement of use of something human-made, such as a term, feature, design, or practice. Typically something is deprecated because it is claimed to be inferior compared to other options available.
Something may be deprec ...
in 2013, with users advised to switch to the current version of Thunderbird.
On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, the
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact ...
acquired full ownership of the
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer.
Since a computer, at base, only ...
, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and domain names. The transfer agreement from Qualcomm also allowed the Computer History Museum to publish the source code under the
BSD
The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...
open source license
Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative ...
. 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.
Under Hermes
Pre-production (2018–2019)
In August 2018, a "small team" started working on patching the
lacunae in the Eudora code, in order to render it usable on modern systems. According to the initial posting on the eudora-win
[This mailing list, run by the Clio ListMoms Cartel, is the ''de facto'' peer support forum for all versions of Eudora for Windows and Eudoramail. ] mailing list, the intent was to decouple entirely from Stingray Desktop, a proprietary library designed for constructing
graphical user interfaces
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...
under Windows. Originally, Stingray Desktop was known as Objective Toolkit and was developed by Stingray Software (which was acquired on March 3, 1998 by
Rogue Wave A rogue wave is an abnormally large ocean wave.
Rogue wave may also refer to:
* Optical rogue waves, are rare pulses of light analogous to rogue or freak ocean waves.
* Rogue Wave Software, a software company
* Rogue Wave (band), an American in ...
); as of 2024, it is produced by
Perforce
Perforce Software, Inc. is an American developer of software used for developing and running applications, including version control software, web-based repository management, developer collaboration, application lifecycle management, web applic ...
. 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) leveraged
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
Trident
A trident (), () is a three- pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and historically as a polearm. As compared to an ordinary spear, the three tines increase the chance that a fish will be struck and decrease the chance that a fish will b ...
as its
browser engine
A browser engine (also known as a layout engine or rendering engine) is a core software component of every major web browser. The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML documents and other resources of a web page into an interacti ...
(i.e.
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
renderer), a software component deprecated by Microsoft in favour of
EdgeHTML
EdgeHTML is a proprietary browser engine from Microsoft that was used in Microsoft Edge Legacy, which debuted in 2015 as part of Windows 10.
EdgeHTML is a fork of the MSHTML (Trident) engine of Internet Explorer. It is designed as a software ...
as of 2018; the latter would be superseded in turn by
Blink
Blinking is a bodily function; it is a semi-autonomic rapid closing of the eyelid. A single blink is determined by the forceful closing of the eyelid or inactivation of the levator palpebrae superioris and the activation of the palpebral por ...
. 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 for
character encoding
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...
, and had instead been hardcoded to declare every e-mail message sent as encoded
iso-8859-1
ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit computing, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character (computing), character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character enc ...
(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, as
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8.
UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...
became more and more popular, it became a problem for everyone without exception.
Finally, Eudora 7.1.0.9 and earlier predated the
Heartbleed
Heartbleed is a security bug in some outdated versions of the OpenSSL cryptography library, which is a widely used implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclos ...
vulnerability and thus refused to negotiate securely using
Transport Layer Security
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over ...
with servers that implemented the security patch; they also did not include a modern
root certificate
In cryptography and computer security, a root certificate is a public key certificate that identifies a root certificate authority (CA). Root certificates are self-signed (and it is possible for a certificate to have multiple trust paths, say if ...
store. Therefore, some users had resorted to tunnelling with
stunnel
Stunnel is an open-source multi-platform application used to provide a universal TLS/SSL tunneling service.
Stunnel is used to provide secure encrypted connections for clients or servers that do not speak TLS or SSL natively. It runs on a va ...
as a workaround while others simply trusted the offending certificates manually.
It was determined that the three former problems had to be remedied in the
executable
In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instruction (computer science), in ...
code of the mail client itself, but that the latter could be patched by replacing two
dynamic-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 an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
licence.
Production (2019–2022)
Eudoramail itself began development on 17 June 2019, using
Perforce
Perforce Software, Inc. is an American developer of software used for developing and running applications, including version control software, web-based repository management, developer collaboration, application lifecycle management, web applic ...
'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). On 31 March 2022, it was announced that "HERMES Mail is on the launchpad and final preparations are made for liftoff", with the initial alpha of Eudoramail 8.0 being released on Aug 1 2022.
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 the ''eudora-win'' mailing list on the Clio ListMoms Cartel, and finally for the public at large.
Features
Eudora 6.0.1 added support for
Bayesian filtering of
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
with a feature called ''SpamWatch''. Eudora 6.2 added a
scam
A scam, or a confidence trick, is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their Trust (emotion), trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using a combination of the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence ...
watch feature that flags suspicious links within emails in an attempt to thwart
phishing
Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticate ...
. Eudora 7.0 added
Indexed search
Indexed search, also called the cutpoint method,Fishman is an algorithm for discrete-distribution pseudo-random number sampling
Non-uniform random variate generation or pseudo-random number sampling is the numerical practice of generating pse ...
(powered by
X1 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 of
x1lib.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 a
modified mbox format (*.mbx), which uses plain
text file
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flat file) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system.
In ope ...
s instead of a database as
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft 365 software suites. Primarily popular as an email client for businesses, Outlook also includes functions such as Calendari ...
does. This allows the user to back up portions of their email correspondence without backing up the entire
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...
.
Eudora supports the
POP3
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, i ...
,
IMAP
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by .
IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...
and
SMTP
The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typi ...
protocols. Eudora also has support for SSL and, in Windows,
S/MIME
S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) is a standard for public-key encryption and signing of MIME data. S/MIME is on an IETF standards track and defined in a number of documents, most importantly . It was originally developed by ...
authentication, allowing users to sign or
encrypt
In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plai ...
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 using
x-eudora-setting URIs that must be pasted into a message and clicked.
Third-party plugins
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.
See also
*
Comparison of email clients
The following tables compare general and technical features of notable non-web-based email client programs.
General
Basic general information about the clients: creator/company, O/S, license, and interface.
Release history
A brief digest ...
*
Eudora Internet Mail Server
Notes
References
External links
*
Pandora Mail an e-mail client intended to replicate the functionality of Eudora
Hermes Messenger- open source fork of Eudora
{{Email clients
Classic Mac OS email clients
MacOS email clients
Qualcomm software
Windows email clients
Discontinued software
Software using the BSD license