As a long-time Eudora user who has run a mailing list with Eudora for over ten years, I was encouraged a number of months ago to discover that Eudora was back under serious development. By that time, it had become evident to many of us that Qualcomm had apparently lost interest in one of its star products for the Macintosh platform.

Like many other Mac Eudora users, I erroneously assumed that with a version number of 8.0, the first beta release of the new Eudora would be familiar ground, and would boast of all of the many features that we Eudora 6.2.4 users have come to enjoy and appreciate.

I was not prepared for the disaster that was Eudora 8.0.0b1. This new application, which the developers have the audacity to call Eudora, is a far cry from the product which was first delivered to us by Qualcomm so many years ago. I won't go into all of the details regarding why I feel this way, as this issue has already been discussed at length in other forums across the Internet.

Suffice it to say that as of beta 3, this new program does not even come close to living up to the Eudora product name. By this time, one would expect that it could properly import all of the data from the original Eudora. Not so. It imported none of the dozens of folders found in my "Mail" folder. At most, it imported perhaps three dozen of the many dozens of filters that I have setup in the original Eudora. About the only thing that it does seem to have imported, is the data found in my address book, and I am not even sure yet if that is complete.

I honestly don't know why the developers chose to give this a version number of 8.0 when it doesn't even possess all of the features of the original Eudora, much less anything new or improved. In fact, I am given the impression that all they are trying to do is cash in on Eudora's good name. In my case, sorry, but that won't do it for me. I don't need a Thunderbird which tries to mimic Eudora. Quite frankly, I think the developers should remove the Eudora name from their product, because this certainly isn't Eudora. It is an impostor trying to win over the Eudora user base, and doing a very poor job at it, at that.

I'll be sticking with Eudora 6.2.4 for a long time to come it seems...and I am still quite happy with it.

This program may be okay for brand new Eudora users, but for those of you who are long-time users of the original Eudora, at its current development stage, I cannot possibly recommend this product.