Eudora

A popular full-featured Internet mail program (mail client) from QUALCOMM for Windows and Mac. Eudora was available in light, sponsored and paid versions (www.eudora.com) and, in the early days of the Internet, was often bundled with computers and ISP startup packages.

Eudora was developed by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois and was first released as freeware for the Macintosh in 1988. It was the first graphics-based mail program that became popular. Later ported to Windows, in time, more than 20 million people would use the product.

From Eudora to Penelope
In 2006, QUALCOMM announced it would no longer offer Eudora after April 2007. However, Eudora lives on in the Penelope open source project at the Mozilla Foundation. Penelope is based on the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client, but enhanced with Eudora features so that Eudora users can migrate to Penelope without losing the functionality they are comfortable with. For more information, visit www.mozilla.org. See Thunderbird.

Eudora Was a Pulitzer Prize Winner
The software was named after Eudora Welty (1909-2001), an American novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner who, along with such greats as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, created a Southern literary renaissance in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1950s. One of Miss Welty's short stories, "Why I Live at the P.O.," was a tale about a woman who lived at the post office instead of at home. It inspired Dorner, who was spending so much time programming a mail application. See stationery.

Eudora - Electronic mail software for communicating over TCP/IP from Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Windows NT, and IBM OS/2 computers. Both commercial and free versions are produced by QUALCOMM, Inc.