This past week Qualcomm, makers of phone software and telecommunications systems, announced that they were dumping their aging Eudora email program and would instead be focusing on contributing to the Mozilla Foundation's excellent Thunderbird program with a Eudora-branded & enhanced edition. While some questions remain to be answered, for example what will happen to the existing code and whether the enhancements to the Eudora-branded edition will be made available in a license suitable for inclusion into the core Thunderbird code-base, it is to all intents a major achievement for one of the world's best open source projects.

From a personal perspective, Eudora was the first email program I ever used on a PC, way back in 1995.  While I had used email apps on other platforms, on Windows it generally felt "right" and worked the way I expected an email app to work.  I continued using it over the years, but the lack of progress and the continual bloat pushed me away from it, and as it happens I migrated to Thunderbird in 2003.  Since then I've helped many other family members also migrate to Thunderbird and it has worked well for them also.  While I'm sorry to see Eudora become little more than a brand name after being the defacto standard for so many years, I'm encouraged to see my cross-platform email app of choice gain more acceptance.