Eudora Lives!
Remember Eudora, the email client that introduced millions to SMTP based email? If you were an early internet user on the Macintosh, you probably used Eudora (anyone remember Quickmail?!). Interestingly, Qualcomm ended up the owners of the inimitable email client and quietly put it to eternal rest last May, unnoticed by nearly all of us. But Qualcomm decided to do a good thing: they open sourced the Eudora code. And the wonderful Mozilla folks have decided to give it life.
Code name Penelope (Eudora 8.0.0b1), it is now available. Penelope is essentially Thunderbird wrapped up in a Eudora skin, but for folks who invested a lot of their time and sensory memory into the Eudora UI - all the keyboard shortcuts, toolbar icons, menu structures and behavior of Eudora is captured in Penelope. Reading the notes on who is developing Penelope, it looks like the last Eudora team at Qualcomm has skipped on over to the project - very, very cool. Having worked on a much loved and widely adopted product (ok, well....ok...another one, too) that had an end of life long before users were ready to give it up, it is a delight to see this: one of the wonderful enablements of the open source movement and I (again) applaud Mozilla.