Important information for Eudora users
Qualcomm, the company that markets and supports the Eudora e-mail client, has announced that they are discontinuing the product. We know that there are some in the college who use this e-mail client. Although we don't recommend or support Eudora (the university and we recommend Thunderbird), we certainly don't want to see anyone who does use it inconvenienced. Thus this announcement.
According to the Eudora web site versions 7.1 and 6.2.4, for Windows and MacOS respectively, will be the last releases. Many Eudora users have been using the "sponsored" version which is free but only if you agree to accept the advertising messages from their "sponsors." Sponsorship, obviously, is ending and the sponsored mode version will revert to "lite" mode (which is functionally limited) at the end of March. If the lite version won't meet your needs, an option is to purchase the full version for $20 which will be a perpetual license.
We do not recommend that you continue to use Eudora. Given that it will no longer be supported the future is uncertain, at best. If there were to be a security vulnerability discovered it may not be fixed. In addition, the current version may not run on Windows Vista or MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) when the college upgrades to those new operating systems in the future. Qualcomm is turning the source code over to the open source community and it's possible that it could continue to thrive as an open source project. There isn't any news on that front, however.
We do recommend that you let us help you convert to Thunderbird as your e-mail software. This kind of change can be very disruptive, we know. E-mail software, because it is used so frequently, becomes second nature after a while and changes are very hard to deal with. In this case, the disruption will be worthwhile in the long run. You'll not have to worry about problems with Eudora not getting fixed. You'll also have support from the university and the college if you run into problems. We've already helped several people (including the dean!) make the change and it seems to have worked out fine.
If you are a Eudora user and would like to make the change, please call the CDes Help Line at 6-7760 and let us know. We'd be glad to help you convert to Thunderbird so that this doesn't turn into a problem for you later on.