
Eudora History: Email for a Different Era - LaSombra
http://tedium.co/2017/09/28/eudora-email-history/
======
hilbert42
Well I still use Eudora, it's installed on this laptop that I'm using now.
Anyone who has used Eudora knows it is the best email client around and it's a
damn tragedy that Qualcomm abandoned it.

Because Qualcomm stopped development over a decade ago certain features are
problematic these days, certificates updates and the lack of a decent HTML
editor for example.

That means that I also have to use Mozilla's Thunderbird for some jobs.

Let me say this categorically: Thunderbird isn't in the race with Eudora. It
would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly
bad Thunderbird is by comparison. If Thunderbird or any other open source
client is ever to catch up with Eudora then a huge amount of work will need to
be done.

There is one thing I've never understood about classic well designed software
and that is why are supposed clones such as Thunderbird so inferior to the
original. One would think Thunderbird's designers would simply copy the Eudora
paradigm and correct its out of date features on the way.

Well it's not so with Thunderbird. Perhaps someone knows the reason why.

Anyway, Eudora is on my machine to stay for the time being. It'll be there
until the POP/IMAP protocol ceases to work!

~~~
stinkytaco
I'm genuinely curious to read that book. I used pine until about 2004 before I
lost access to it and migrated to webmail more or less permanently. Perhaps my
email usage is plain compared to yours? I still fire up Thunderbird to archive
my mail, but that's it. I still pine for pine sometimes (I couldn't resist),
but I have to imagine some of that is rose colored glasses.

~~~
twic
I started using Pine at university, and still do. Trying out Mutt has been on
my to-do list for almost twenty years now.

~~~
stinkytaco
I started using it when I was in school (probably around 7th grade) and we
were given shell accounts on a server somewhere. I used it that way until I
left university in 2004. After that I needed to set up a new email account and
started using webmail. I also wasn't regularly telneting into a shell so
didn't really have access. The things that made it really good: threading,
keywords (basically tags), and keyboard navigation were done pretty well in
gmail. It also had good filtering. But I feel like I need support for images
and HTML, even if I hate those things in email.

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buro9
My favourite email program was The Bat!

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

It was the one I used the most as it was the first that really permitted me to
save every email from 1996 through to around 2007 when I finally migrated all
of my email onto Gmail (I'd kept a Windows machine around solely to use The
Bat! and decided to go all-in on webmail once Gmail was capable enough).

Simple for PGP, complex filtering, fast search over tens of thousands of
emails, fast retrieval, great UI. It was great.

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wogna
> “If an e-mail program can survive the merciless scrutiny of the internet
> community, it’s got to be good,”

How comes email managed to federate multiple incompatible systems (MCI,MS
Mail,X.400,etc.) into an open RFC standard, where other protocols (instant
messaging in particular) failed?

~~~
digi_owl
Because email came from academia while IM was commercial from the start...

~~~
mxuribe
Very much agree with your comment here...but I'd add that the thinking behind
email was to idealistically connect people, while IM was to connect people
specifically for the purposes of making money, building a business, etc. I
wish the feeling behind email still existed, at least in an altruistic
sense...Nowadays, it seems like everyone is simply jumping on whatever
platform is the hottest of the moment. My daughter and her friends constantly
have to jump between a handful of proprietary "messaging" platforms to contact
each other...and of course as a curmudgeon Dad, i remind her that "in my day",
we would just ping each other via email, and we liked it by gum! ;-) Seriously
though, I sure hope we all standardize on something like matrix.org (the
protocol) for both short-term/fast-paced (IM/chat-style) messaging as well as
the longer form style of classic email. One platform (and client) - based on
something like matrix - to rule all of my messaging needs would be so awesome!

~~~
KGIII
Your comment made me pause.

IM has a longer history than you might think. You could send instant messages
to people on your network, long before there was anything commercial about it.

IM functions have existed on systems for a very long time. Some of them even
had groups and various permissions associated with that. On top of that, there
were overall user permissions with varied levels. They could send messages to
other people in their same usergroups. An example would be /wallops or
/globops, and similar commands. You still see that functionality built into
things like IRC servers and some clients. There was also a /msg{user} command.
There were also messages sent to the operator on duty, and things like that.

So, this doesn't detract from your overall point. I just figured you should
know that IM wasn't created as a business, so much as it was a way to
communicate with other people. It would be many years before people sought a
profit in it, the monitorization of it was a bit later than that. The first
monetization efforts, that I remember, were in selling products (and services)
that made it easier on internal networks. For a while, Novell was pretty big
in that space, but they weren't the first.

IM has quite a history. Someone should write a book on it.

~~~
mxuribe
Oh wow, you're totally correct; how could i have forgotten IRC!?! Yep, i
definitely should have included good ol' IRC; thanks! :-)

~~~
KGIII
IRC wasn't even the beginning. Chance are, your OS still retains a message
user function buried in it. Good ones would even store your messages when you
were offline. They would save them to what some termed their wall. If you had
permissions, then you'd be able to message whole groups of users. You might
even be able to give a broad message to everyone called the MotD.

I'm not sure of the absolute beginnings, but there has probably been IM since
they first networked two computers together. It was probably the second thing
they wrote and the first message was probably a fart joke.

------
Haul4ss
Gosh, I loved Eudora! I used it into the 2000s. Eventually was (forcibly)
migrated to Outlook at work, and Gmail came along in 2004 to convert me off of
desktop mail clients at home.

Seeing the picture of that box brought back memories (such as when software
came in boxes!)

------
paultopia
Oh how I miss Eudora. It’s the only thing I actually miss from back in my days
of using Windows. Thunderbird was never an adequate replacement, and now I
sadly use Apple mail and curse it every day.

~~~
jgtrosh
How about TUI clients like mutt which are made in curses ?

~~~
paultopia
I just googled mutt, and am now seriously considering it as a replacement.
thanks!

------
psychometry
> But in the end, only the power users stuck around

"Power user" would be the last term I'd use to describe Eudora users in the
mid-2000s at the university where I did tech support. They were generally
emeritus professors who had to be instructed whether each click was a left-
click or a right-click.

Supporting Eudora was such an absolute nightmare that we had a help desk party
when official campus support was terminated. It was an unstable, opaque mess
of an email client compared to its 21st century contemporaries.

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ryanqian
firefox and thunderbird they are usually mention at same time,but now only
firefox got the attention. No one care thunderbird anymore. Webmail turn to
main stream.

~~~
mrweasel
I somewhat care, in that I still want a desktop email client, but they all
kinda suck and Thunderbird is no exception. It's slow and the GUI is rather
flaky (and subjectively rather messy).

Every new email client seems to be more interested in re-inventing email that
providing a simple straight forward client for "old school" usage.

Currently I use Apples email client, not that I absolutely love it or don't
think it could be better, it's just the least no nonsense client currently
available.

Thunderbird fails to deliver, for me at least, the same feeling of a well
designed powerful application that Firefox does in the browser space.

~~~
jgtrosh
For old-school clients that perform very well in most regards, have you tried
Claws Mail or Mutt ?

------
dep_b
I used Courier Email a lot during that era. It was the time receiving an email
still could mean a valuable communication from somebody you actually cared
about. Those mails were cherished in a specialized mail client and given a
permanent place on your hard drive.

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msarnoff
Eudora was my first introduction to email! This would have been around 1994 or
1995, on Macintosh System 7.

When you had new mail, a dialog popped up with a picture of a rooster holding
a letter in its beak. If you checked your mail and didn't have any, the dialog
would show a picture of a snake. After searching the internet for screenshots
of these for years, I finally found them!
[http://old.accesscom.com/support/macintosh/mac-
eudora2.html](http://old.accesscom.com/support/macintosh/mac-eudora2.html)

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phyzome
I never used Eudora, but I use Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed Claws) and it
sounds like it has a lot of the same features. Very customizable, powerful
mail filtering, and an ancient UI. :-P

~~~
verri
> (formerly Sylpheed Claws)

Hey! Some of us are still using Sylpheed! :)

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nvr219
I correspond with some people that still use PINE... for some reason

