Qualcomm announced that it’s giving up on developing the venerable Eudora email client. Instead, it’s working with the Mozilla Foundation to help Eudora users migrate to the open source Thunderbird client. The project to do this is known as Penelope.

Penelope will add several features to Thunderbird, including:

• Data and settings import, to help with migration
• User interface options, to make the client more familiar for Eudora users (e.g., keyboard accelerators)
• Stationery

This is good news for Eudora users. Eudora hasn’t had a bright future for some considerable time — it’s hardly been a shining star on Qualcomm’s balance sheet. This will move Eudora users onto a more stable code platform — one that’s being actively developed.

This is also good news for Thunderbird users, as it adds new ideas to the development team — a team that at times can feel like the ugly sister compared to the Firefox browser.

… Richi Jennings