As a long-time email and Mac user, it’s with both great hope and some sadness that I read of Eudora’s impending transition to open-source, using the Mozilla Thunderbird engine. While I’ve known of this transition for a while, the fact that it’s official is bittersweet.

When I first started using email back at the University of Utah, Eudora was the email client of choice. It ran on a Mac, which was the dominant operating system on campus, and it fit on a single, 800 KB floppy disk – perfect for using in a campus lab or at home. The graphic interface and filters beat the pants off of ELM and PINE, the two Unix command line mail applications that were the options to Eudora.

I continued to use Eudora throughout my college years, both at Utah and at Conn, and used it during my first years in the workforce. As time progressed, email became more elaborate: the web took off, and with it the need for more advanced features arose: people had more than one email account, rich-text and HTML email arrived on the scene, and IMAP and POP3 battled for email server supremacy.

All the while, Eudora didn’t do too much to evolve. Multiple account capabilities and IMAP support came about in newer versions, but the interface didn’t keep up with new user interface standards. And HTML support was woeful: a message that looked snappy in the newer Microsoft Exchange and Outlook Express, or in Netscape’s Communicator, looked like absolute crap in Eudora (it took until Eudora 7 for Windows for semi-decent HTML rendering to appear). While many power-users who enjoyed Eudora’s still-superior filtering and sorting features kept using the app, new email users and folks who needed more robust mail formatting support looked elsewhere.

And here it is, 2006, and Eudora has decided to do the right thing: they’ve decided to abandon the tedious process of cobbling together their old code into a more modern email application, which was proving especially tough on the Mac OS. Instead, they are working with the most cutting-edge mail application engine – Thunderbird – and marrying Eudora’s excellent filtering and mail-handling abilities to the chassis. The Thunderbird HTML engine is the best in the industry, and its IMAP support is also industry-leading – two areas in which the current Eudora application is sorely in need of retooling.

If all goes according to plan, it should be a fantastic alternative to Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail. The price for the app will also come down, as Eudora 8 will be free. Eudora will have new inroads in the higher education and corporate markets with its new formula, and that could bode very, very well.

I’m glad to see the Eudora will continue to live, but I’m sad that the great business experiment that evolved out of a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign student project has ended up in the land of the no-profit, open-source wilderness. While there have been some notable success stories with this model (e.g. the Mozilla projects and various Linux flavors), there have been countless more that are floundering (e.g. the Opera browser) or failed. I hope that Eudora survives – and thrives – as an open-source project.