8 ms·

Eudora History: Email for a Different Era

73 points by LaSombra 9y ago

wogna 9y ago
> “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?
- ghaff 9y ago
  Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important. Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
  - Macha 9y ago
    AIM was not a unified IM system. For starters, they made it hard to sign up outside the US (the sign up form needed a valid zip code). As a result MSN was more popular in Western Europe, and I get the impression that ICQ took the lead in Eastern Europe. (until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Msn messenger didn't become popular until XP shipped. At that point MS made it load on boot and nag you about signing up. And at that point ICQ had been around for years.
    - kps 9y ago
      Apple's iChat was an AIM client, until they dropped it for iMessage and screwed the existing users. (Am I seeing a pattern here?)
      - ascagnel_ 9y ago
        I don't think Apple so much as dropped support for AIM as much as AIM dropped support for its more-open OSCAR protocol -- the same thing that apps like Pidgin used to connect to AIM. The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
    - verri 9y ago
      I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Because email came from academia while IM was commercial from the start...
  - mxuribe 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
- detaro 9y ago
  At that time, there wasn't much commercial interest in having e-mail fragmented. For messengers, no company wanted to give up their users and their things. For a while, multi-clients like Pidgin, Miranda or Trillian sort of fixed that for users, now we pretty much seem to be back to darker ages in that regard, thanks to tons of messengers being based on "one mobile device per account" models. You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    In my time I have had high hopes for the following: WebRTC, XMPP, Zephyr, Ricochet, or one of the commercial protocols becoming standard. I now have high hopes for RCS and Matrix, but I'm not terribly optimistic.
buro9 9y ago
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.
Haul4ss 9y ago
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!)
ryanqian 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    For old-school clients that perform very well in most regards, have you tried Claws Mail or Mutt ?
dep_b 9y ago
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.
paultopia 9y ago
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 9y ago
  How about TUI clients like mutt which are made in curses ?
  - paultopia 9y ago
    I just googled mutt, and am now seriously considering it as a replacement. thanks!
hilbert42 9y ago
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!
- speps 9y ago
  > It would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly bad Thunderbird is by comparison. I would read that :)
- KGIII 9y ago
  I have used Eudora and don't think it was the best. I would include it in the top ten, but not call it the best. What would I call the best? Try not to laugh, but I liked Outlook Express. OE is one of the few applications I miss from the Windows ecosystem. I also liked The Bat and the client that came with Opera. I have grown fond of Thunderbird, but I'd not call it the best.
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    Pegasus Mail!
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    There is no way to back up OE mail. It stores email in hidden directories in an undocumented binary format. I abandoned it for that reason.
phyzome 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > (formerly Sylpheed Claws) Hey! Some of us are still using Sylpheed! :)
psychometry 9y ago
> 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.
nvr219 9y ago
I correspond with some people that still use PINE... for some reason
msarnoff 9y ago
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

73 points by LaSombra 9y ago

> “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?

ghaff 9y ago
Interesting question. I'd speculate that IM in particular was unified enough around AOL and SMS. (And clients like Trillium did work across systems.) And with smartphone apps and notifications, having a single universal messaging client was less important. Email was quite fractured at one time but it did become pretty interoperable when it went mainstream.
- Macha 9y ago
  AIM was not a unified IM system. For starters, they made it hard to sign up outside the US (the sign up form needed a valid zip code). As a result MSN was more popular in Western Europe, and I get the impression that ICQ took the lead in Eastern Europe. (until Skype, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp took over)
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Msn messenger didn't become popular until XP shipped. At that point MS made it load on boot and nag you about signing up. And at that point ICQ had been around for years.
  - kps 9y ago
    Apple's iChat was an AIM client, until they dropped it for iMessage and screwed the existing users. (Am I seeing a pattern here?)
    - ascagnel_ 9y ago
      I don't think Apple so much as dropped support for AIM as much as AIM dropped support for its more-open OSCAR protocol -- the same thing that apps like Pidgin used to connect to AIM. The trend is that the people running the IM services want control of the clients, and so they shut off outside access or create new services that never support open protocols (see also: Facebook Chat, Google Hangouts, Apple iMessage).
  - verri 9y ago
    I can't comment on the situation in eastern-europe, but what essentially killed any chance of standardization here in west-europe was the dominance of MSN messenger that came bundled with Windows. Their embrace/extend/extinguish approach towards IRC didn't help either.
digi_owl 9y ago
Because email came from academia while IM was commercial from the start...
- mxuribe 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
detaro 9y ago
At that time, there wasn't much commercial interest in having e-mail fragmented. For messengers, no company wanted to give up their users and their things. For a while, multi-clients like Pidgin, Miranda or Trillian sort of fixed that for users, now we pretty much seem to be back to darker ages in that regard, thanks to tons of messengers being based on "one mobile device per account" models. You see some of that with e-mail and development around it as well (webmail for more features instead of clients and protocols, ...)
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  In my time I have had high hopes for the following: WebRTC, XMPP, Zephyr, Ricochet, or one of the commercial protocols becoming standard. I now have high hopes for RCS and Matrix, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

buro9 9y ago

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.

Haul4ss 9y ago

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!)

ryanqian 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  For old-school clients that perform very well in most regards, have you tried Claws Mail or Mutt ?

dep_b 9y ago

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.

paultopia 9y ago

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 9y ago
How about TUI clients like mutt which are made in curses ?
- paultopia 9y ago
  I just googled mutt, and am now seriously considering it as a replacement. thanks!

hilbert42 9y ago

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!

speps 9y ago
> It would take chapters for me to do a proper comparison and show you how truly bad Thunderbird is by comparison. I would read that :)
KGIII 9y ago
I have used Eudora and don't think it was the best. I would include it in the top ten, but not call it the best. What would I call the best? Try not to laugh, but I liked Outlook Express. OE is one of the few applications I miss from the Windows ecosystem. I also liked The Bat and the client that came with Opera. I have grown fond of Thunderbird, but I'd not call it the best.
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  Pegasus Mail!
- WalterBright 9y ago
  There is no way to back up OE mail. It stores email in hidden directories in an undocumented binary format. I abandoned it for that reason.

phyzome 9y ago

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 9y ago
> (formerly Sylpheed Claws) Hey! Some of us are still using Sylpheed! :)

psychometry 9y ago

> 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.

nvr219 9y ago

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

msarnoff 9y ago

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