Ferris Research — Goodbye Eudora, Hello Mozilla Penelope

Richi Jennings — 11 October 2006
Qualcomm announced that it’s giving up on developing the venerable Eudora email client. Instead, it’s working with the Mozilla Foundation to help Eudora users migrate to the open source Thunderbird client. The project to do this is known as Penelope.

Penelope will add several features to Thunderbird, including:

* Data and settings import, to help with migration
* User interface options, to make the client more familiar for Eudora users (e.g., keyboard accelerators)
* Stationery

This is good news for Eudora users. Eudora hasn’t had a bright future for some considerable time — it’s hardly been a shining star on Qualcomm’s balance sheet. This will move Eudora users onto a more stable code platform — one that’s being actively developed.

T-bird already has import tools for Eudora messages, addresses and settings but this proposed hybrid is more likely to appeal to died-in-the-wool users of the Qualcomm software.

Greek mythology tells us that Penelope was the wife of Odysseus. While he was away clocking up the sea miles, she had to resist the attentions of several suitors. To stall them, she said she wouldn’t declare herself a widow until she had finished weaving a shroud for Laertes, her dead father-in-law.

For the next three years she unpicked by night the piece she had made that day. Nobody seemed to detect the cause of the lack of progress — well, it is a myth — but her maid gave the game away. Just then, Odysseus arrived home, saving Penelope from having to choose among this group of unobservant wooers.

Let’s hope the Penelope codeweavers make speedier progress; people aren’t so patient or so inattentive today.