Eudora

» see eudora.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i never used eudora. by the time i had real email in turkey, around 1999, the move was already hotmail in a netscape window or yahoo mail with the purple and yellow ads. eudora was a paid desktop client that ran on macs and windows, costing real money to download somewhere outside of turkey. the audience for it in tr was academic, mostly people whose mit or stanford accounts they had brought home with them.

that was not nothing. for the late 80s and the entire 90s, eudora was the email client people who actually understood email used. it spoke pop3 and imap before most people knew what those were, and it had a bayesian spam filter called spamwatch before non-academic users had ever met the word bayesian. for fifteen years it was what your professor's machine ran when you saw their inbox over their shoulder.

then webmail won. hotmail and yahoo offered something eudora structurally could not match: an inbox you could open from any machine without installing a paid client first. by 2003 the dial-up email-client model was over for everyone except the holdouts. qualcomm gave up in 2006 and turned eudora into a thunderbird skin called eudora 8. nobody wanted it, and that was the end of the active product.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

steve dorner wrote the first eudora in 1988 at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign. he named it after the writer eudora welty because of her short story "why i live at the p.o." dorner's tagline was "bringing the p.o. to where you live", which is the kind of joke a lone developer writes at midnight and then everyone keeps for twenty years. welty herself was reportedly amused.

qualcomm acquired eudora in 1991 and kept it as a side project for over a decade. there was a free ad-supported version and a paid pro version, and the pro version was where the real users lived. eudora pro at peak had something like 18 million paying or active users, which was a serious business for an email client. it just was not a serious business for qualcomm, whose chip royalty revenue was orders of magnitude bigger.

~ the long tail ~

qualcomm released a final commercial version in 2006 and stopped charging. the open-sourced thunderbird-based eudora 8 limped along until 2010 and then stopped. in 2018 the computer history museum got the actual source code under a bsd license, and a small fork called eudoramail showed up to keep the original engine alive for hobbyists.

the people who used eudora seriously still talk about its filters. the modern equivalent of a sane personal mail filter, the kind that quietly sorts twenty years of mailing-list traffic without ceremony, is a thing email never quite recovered after the gmail conversation-view paradigm took over.

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