Releasing the Eudora™ Email Client Source Code

By Len Shustek

Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.

Email has a long and storied history, dating back to MIT’s Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS) and the US government’s AUTODIN in the early 1960s. These early systems, which often used propriety communications networks and protocols, were generally incompatible with each other; you could only exchange mail with people using the same system.

The first email on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s internet) was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, and mail formats became standardized (RFC 524, RFC 561) soon thereafter. In the 1980s, the Post Office Protocol for TCP/IP codified the communication between email clients (which run on the user’s computer) and the email server (where messages are received from other systems and stored), so that there could be independent implementations of both on different computers and operating systems.

Eventually many email clients were written for personal computers, but few became as successful as Eudora. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of happy users. Eudora was elegant, fast, feature-rich, and could cope with mail repositories containing hundreds of thousands of messages. In my opinion it was the finest email client ever written, and it has yet to be surpassed.

I still use it today, but, alas, the last version of Eudora was released in 2006. It may not be long for this world. With thanks to Qualcomm, we are pleased to release the Eudora source code for its historical interest, and with the faint hope that it might be resuscitated. I will muse more about that later.

How Eudora Came to Be

In the 1980s, Steve Dorner was working at the computer center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I started Eudora in 1988, at the University of Illinois, about four years before I came to Qualcomm. We began it because the internet was a growing and burgeoning place, but email was not really established on the desktop computers that people were using at the time. It was something that you logged in to some mainframe computer to do, and with the ease of use that the desktop operating systems brought, that just wasn’t the right way for people to do email anymore.”

It took Dorner just over a year to create the first version of Eudora, which had 50,000 lines of C code and ran only on the Apple Macintosh. Like many university-produced programs, it was available to anyone for free.

Why did he call it Eudora? Dorner explained for a 1997 article in the New York Times CyberTimes that it was because of a short story he had read in college: “Why I Live at the P.O,” by Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Working intently on an email program, Dorner said “I felt like I lived at the post office.”

In 1991, Qualcomm, a communications company in San Diego famous for CDMA cellular communications technology, licensed Eudora from the University of Illinois. Dorner was eventually hired by them to continue to develop it, working remotely from his home in Illinois.

Qualcomm’s motivations were several. They knew that the internet would fuel the need for wireless data, and they thought that email would be one of the drivers. They also thought it prudent to diversify beyond ICs for wireless technology into software applications.

But Eudora as a Mac-only product wouldn’t cut it. Qualcomm project manager John Noerenberg assigned Jeff Beckley and Jeff Gehlhaar in San Diego the task of making an MS-DOS and then a Windows version of the program. “The style of the company was to put an MS-DOS or Macintosh computer on each employee’s desk — whichever most suited their needs and their personal preference,” he said. “We required email software that was internet-savvy, and platform agnostic. There wasn’t anything commercially available that satisfied either of those goals, much less both.”

Initially Eudora was only used internally at Qualcomm. It was well-received. Noerenberg heard one financial executive at Qualcomm saying, “I used to hate email. But I love Eudora!!” and observed, “It was at that moment I realized we were on to something.”

The company later said, “As a leader in developing and delivering digital communications, Qualcomm recognized email as an important communications tool for the future,” and they released it as a consumer product in 1993. The Eudora team at Qualcomm expanded quickly from the initial four to a moderately large product group, and at its peak was over 50 people.

The Rise of Eudora

The Qualcomm version of Eudora was originally available for free, and it quickly gained in popularity. To get a feel for the user community, Beckley called it “postcard-ware” and asked people to send him a postcard if they liked it. “I got thousands of postcards from all over the world. . . . There was this great feeling about the software, and everybody really loved it.”

“But,” Noerenberg recalls, “postcards don’t pay the bills.” He faced management pressure to stop spending money on a free product. “In 1993 I hatched the idea that if we could somehow convince Qualcomm there was money in an internet software business, we could turn this into a product and we’d get to keep doing what we loved.”

Eudora was soon commercialized as a paid version for $19.95. There was still a free version, now supported by advertisements. By 2001, over 100 person-years of development had been invested in the Windows and Macintosh versions. The paid version eventually sold for as much as $65, and it was aggressively marketed by Qualcomm.