The Mozilla Foundation last week released the first beta version, 8.0.0b1, of the revised Eudora e-mail application since Qualcomm stopped developing it commercially and turned it over to the open-source community in 2006.
Mozilla already has an open-source e-mail program, Thunderbird, and the new Eudora will be a branded offshoot, with some new features, according to the release site. In addition, a related extension called "Penelope" will provide some extra features to both Eudora and Thunderbird.
Eudora rose to popularity in the dial-up days of the Internet, but it was mostly supplanted by Microsoft Outlook Express and by Web-based e-mail services.
Qualcomm launched its last commercially supported version of Eudora last October. However, six Qualcomm Eudora programmers are now working on the Mozilla version.
The beta version is available for Windows and Mac OS X.
