Only a few years ago many Internet users would swear by Eudora, even though it was a paid-for product. You'd often find that people would rate this over and above the free Outlook Express, even though that was a more than capable email client. How times have changed. Even though Outlook Express is no more, Thunderbird is one of the more popular free email clients, which has left the publishers of Eudora with a dilemma - they still have a large userbase, but the long-term future of a commercial Eudora didn't make financial sense.

Eudora 8 beta 1 is the first preview version of the forthcoming major Eudora revision, from Mozilla. Eudora was given over to the open-source development community, although a number of the Eudora developers are still contributing to the development. Eudora 8 beta 1 is based on the free Thunderbird, so it's a bit of a departure from the previous Eudora. You'll need to decide yourself whether it's worth considering or whether you might as well simply use Thunderbird.

05 Sep 2007