Migration from Eudora to Thunderbird
We’ve been working for almost a year now on a plan to migrate away from Eudora as an email client. Qualcomm announced last year that they are discontinuing Eudora as a product, and they have already stopped development. This has left us with an email client with known security holes which are never going to be fixed; an unpleasant situation for all concerned. Qualcomm had really given up on Eudora long before the announcement, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise to us.
Most of the team that was working on Eudora at Qualcomm, including Steve Dorner, Eudora’s original developer, are now working for the Thunderbird project. Thunderbird is an open-source, full-featured email client, and it really is a pretty good product. I’ve been using it myself for a few months, and I think it’s pretty easy to use, and more reliable than Eudora was.
We know that people have a lot of experience working with Eudora, and in some cases a huge number of existing mailboxes and address book entries. One of the things we’ve been spending time doing is coming up with documentation to help users with the transition. Check out our Thunderbird pages; they give some basic background on the program, as well as information which will help Eudora users familiarize themselves with the new client.
Right now we’re testing our migration procedures with a few test departments and with selected individuals; there are a few expected glitches, but in most cases the transition isn’t too difficult. We expect that we’ll be starting to schedule migrations for all our departments in September.
The UCB Messaging Steering Committee today sent out a memo to the campus technical mailing lists officially de-supporting Eudora, and recommending Thunderbird as a replacement. They give a deadline of October 31, but that deadline is kind of arbitrary; that’s the day the UC support contract with Qualcomm runs out, but it’s not like Qualcomm is giving us any support, anyway. LSCR’s timeline is a little more extended than that; we’re expecting to have the bulk of our users migrated by the end of the calendar year.
Contact your support team if you’re interested in being migrated early in the process, or if you have any questions.
Tom,
Thanks for this notice and also a sense of the time line. I have one question: you acknowledge that some of us have a considerable number of mailboxes and address book entries but you don’t explicitly say whether the migration LSCR will perform for us will migrate those intact or whether it will be up to us to import them into Thunderbird. Your mention of “documentation to help users with the transition,” placed right after the sentence about mailboxes and address books, leads me to think you might be leaving this part up to us. Please say it ain’t so.
XOX
Comment by Alix Schwartz — August 10, 2007 @ 8:12 am
Is Thunderbird worth of? I mean whats the disadvantage in Eudora??
Comment by Infinity — August 13, 2007 @ 11:56 pm
Alix: For our customers, we will be handling the migration of both mailboxes and address books. Don’t worry! We’ll be in touch to schedule your department’s migration.
Comment by tom — August 15, 2007 @ 2:43 pm