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The Computer History Museum has release the source code for the Eudora E-mail Client. Back when the other e-mail clients were text-based, Eudora became one of the first popular email utilities to feature a graphical user interface. It was initially created for the Macintosh computers by Steve Dorner in 1988. Some e-mail clients, especially web clients, have taken forever to catch up with Eudora's capabilities. Some pretend clients, like Outlook, may never catch up. Now is the chance. The Eudora source code is available freely for both personal and commercial use, as long as the Eudora trademark is not infringed upon.
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Computer History Museum Releases Eudora E-mail Client Source Code
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Never use "etc." -- it makes people think there is more where there is not
or that there is not space to list it all, etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Friday May 25 2018, @07:01AM (2 children)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @09:52AM
I used it originally on Windows 3.11 using the Win16 API. QT3 puts it early '00s, which makes this a very late version of the client. Would love to know if earlier releases source code has survived and if it will be released in due time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @12:01PM
Qt 3.x to 4.x was not exactly seamless for porters, 4.x to 5.x was better.
Still doable, everything is doable. Has anybody here "done" Qt 5 on Android yet? I tried it about 4 years back, Lighthouse and various other things, it wasn't easy enough to inspire a proof of concept project then.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Friday May 25 2018, @07:08AM (1 child)
I would like to thank the people who had the authority to release this.
Because of you, innumerable students of the art will look at the source to gain insight on how to build things.
While the rest of us have some nostalgia to fall back on.
I could only wish other people who no longer saw fit to maintain old stuff just let it go free instead of confining it to oblivion.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 25 2018, @06:07PM
In the case of games, they could at least hop on the GoG bandwagon.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Friday May 25 2018, @09:25AM (5 children)
I tried using it after reading accolades from multiple people on ye olde website. I suppose it must be almost 10 years since then... it was crashing all the time for me, so I ultimately went to Claws Mail.
Can someone tell me what was special about Eudora? What did I miss?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @12:05PM (2 children)
For a long time, it just worked. My wife used it - it always did what she wanted, never gave me support problems. We eventually migrated to gmail - would be nice if Eudora makes a comeback with good functioning desktop and phone clients.
In the late 90s I identified e-mail as an underserved software market, bought a book on POP and thought I might author something better than whatever was out there. Life and dot-com distractions took my time, and then Eudora came out - and after that I didn't see the point in trying to compete, it really was pretty good.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday May 25 2018, @02:39PM (1 child)
Agreed. Mid to late 90s it was a good application that was easily configurable and worked well. I can't remember specific features it excelled at, but the user experience back then was better than a lot of other options around at the time. I didn't have much experience with it much past 2000 as more and more of my stuff worked off of webmail or I was forced to use certain other clients by work, so I don't know what happened to it later...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @02:51PM
My wife hung on using Eudora until at least 2006, but it was getting too out of date to be useful for me by then.
I remember automatic mail sorting into folders that worked better than anything even today, pretty good attachment handling on par with today's clients, and excellent search - as good as gmail for the local Eudora message database.
Ultimately, managing that database and migrating it to new computers was Eudora's downfall. Back when you only had one computer that you accessed e-mail from, it was great. Separation of work and home e-mail was a natural thing to accept, but today - I've got at least 4 desktops plus a cellphone that I access my e-mail from on a regular basis, and several times a year I tap in from other places, too - that's where "the cloud" has won.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Friday May 25 2018, @12:14PM
I miss Eudora. It was almost infinitely configurable with the X-Eudora extensions so it did exactly what you wanted it to.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday May 25 2018, @07:18PM
A mail client doesn't matter that much to me, since none of them implement the filtering features I want. I managed to do it myself server-side though, with incrond to monitor inbox directories and scan messages. Only problem is that incrond seems to have lots of memory leaks, so I have to restart it frequently.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 4, Interesting) by N3Roaster on Friday May 25 2018, @01:10PM
I remember using Eudora back around the time of the first major worms propagated by Outlook. These were relatively large attachments at a time when dial up access was still the norm and my ISPs mail server would drop connections after (IIRC) an hour. Eudora had rather suboptimal behavior in this situation at the time. The way that it fetched mail was to first get a list of messages, then download each message in the list, then tell the server to delete each message in the list. You can probably guess where this is headed.
One day I connected to the Internet, tried to get my email, and Eudora found a mailbox completely flooded with malware. It attempted to download all of that but over the slow network connection it wasn't finished within the hour that the server allowed. The connection to the server dropped, Eudora errored out, and when I retried, it started over from the beginning. While my Mac running Eudora wasn't susceptible to infection and wasn't a contamination vector for the worm, this was still an effective denial of service attack on my email.
When I figured out what was going on, I looked up the relevant RFC and wrote my first mail client: a program that would let me delete messages from the server without downloading them. Nobody was legitimately sending me messages as large as that worm back then so I just did it based on message size, but I later extended the program to allow users to delete messages based on other conditions as well.
These days mail servers are more likely to have malware/spam filters, Internet connections are a lot faster and almost always on, mail clients are generally more resilient to these sorts of error conditions, and other changes all combine to make a program like this of little use, but it was a good learning experience at the time. Hopefully Eudora eventually fixed this behavior.
Typica - Free software for coffee roasting professionals. [typica.us]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @02:00PM