Pre-Qualcomm (1988–1991) Eudora was developed in 1988 by
Steve Dorner, who worked at the Computer Services Organization of the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The software was named after American author
Eudora Welty because of her short story "
Why I Live at the P.O." Dorner rearranged the title to form the slogan "Bringing the P.O. to Where You Live" for his software. Although he regretted naming it after the still-living author because he thought doing so was "presumptuous", Welty was reportedly "pleased and amused" by Dorner's tribute.
Qualcomm years and first Windows version (1991–2006) Eudora was acquired by
Qualcomm in 1991. Qualcomm produced a visually and functionally similar
analogue, though the resemblance was merely superficial. Until the birth-
cum-death of Eudora OSE, the Mac and Windows programs were developed by different teams at Qualcomm, in different programming languages (
C and
C++), and had different milestones. Qualcomm instead sponsored the creation of a new open-source version based on
Mozilla Thunderbird, code-named Penelope, later renamed to Eudora OSE. Development of the open-source version stopped in 2010 and was officially
deprecated in 2013, with users advised to switch to the current version of Thunderbird. On May 22, 2018, after five years of discussion with Qualcomm, the
Computer History Museum acquired full ownership of the
source code, the Eudora trademarks, copyrights, and domain names. The transfer agreement from Qualcomm also allowed the Computer History Museum to publish the source code under the
BSD open source license. The Eudora source code distributed by the Computer History Museum is the same except for the addition of the new license, code sanitization of profanity within its comments, and the removal of third-party software whose distribution rights had long expired. mailing list, the intent was to decouple entirely from Stingray Desktop, a proprietary library designed for constructing
graphical user interfaces under Windows. Originally, Stingray Desktop was known as Objective Toolkit and was developed by Stingray Software (which was acquired on March 3, 1998 by
Rogue Wave). As of 2024, it is produced by
Perforce. The rationale was that this would allow the mail client (named simply "Hermes Mail" at the time) to be fully open source. Likewise, Eudora for Windows 7.1.0.9 (the final version released by Qualcomm) leveraged
Microsoft Trident as its
browser engine (i.e.,
HTML renderer), a software component deprecated by Microsoft in favor of
EdgeHTML as of 2018. EdgeHTML was superseded in turn by
Blink. Replacing Trident was part of the project's strategy at the outset and, as of June 2024, remains so (see "Features",
infra). During the time it had been under Qualcomm management, Eudora for Windows had never implemented support for
character encoding, and had instead been hardcoded to declare every e-mail message sent as encoded
iso-8859-1 (irrespective of the actual content) and to display every incoming message using the system encoding (one of the Windows encodings, depending on the language version of the system). Even before 2006, this created problems for users corresponding in languages other than Western European ones. Later on, as
UTF-8 became more and more popular, it became a problem for everyone without exception. Finally, Eudora 7.1.0.9 and earlier predated the
Heartbleed vulnerability and thus refused to negotiate securely using
Transport Layer Security with servers that implemented the security patch. They also did not include a modern
root certificate store. Therefore, some users had resorted to tunnelling with
stunnel as a workaround, while others simply trusted the offending certificates manually. It was determined that the three former problems had to be remedied in the
executable code of the mail client itself, but that the latter could be patched by replacing two
dynamic-link libraries and the root-certificate store. Accordingly, pre-production of the mail client (which underwent a rebrand, first from "Hermes Mail" to the project codename "Aurora", and subsequently to "Eudoramail") involved the release of the so-called "HERMES SSL Extensions", also under an
open source license.
Production (2019–2022) Eudoramail itself began development on 17 June 2019, using
Perforce's Stingray user-interface toolkit, "no matter how distasteful we find that to be", a decision the developers felt was justified "given our talents, circumstances and limitations", notwithstanding the estimated outlay (between $2,800 and $3,600). On 31 March 2022, it was announced that "HERMES Mail is on the launchpad and final preparations are made for liftoff", with the initial alpha of Eudoramail 8.0 being released on Aug 1 2022. and finally for the public at large. == Features ==