The commercial version of the Eudora mail client was retired in October 2006. Now, a beta version of the new revitalized Eudora has just been released.

The developers have been working on migrating the mail program to Mozilla underpinnings for about a year. Version 8.01 is the first working beta, although it is currently available for Windows and Mac OSX only.

According to the developers the current beta is not stable enough to replace the last commercial version; however, they do expect to have the first fully functional version up and running by early 2008. Eudora is not aiming to compete with Thunderbird but to give users more freedom of choice. According to the readme this is a branded version of the popular mail client with additional features. The Penelope project is the umbrella for a Thunderbird and Eudora extension.

Vendor Qualcom announced in October 2006 that it was discontinuing development of the mail client, but to avoid ditching the project entirely, program development has continued on the basis of Mozilla Thunderbird code. Qualcomm has not only given the brand name to the community, but has also assigned developers from its own ranks to work on the Open Source variant. The project is licensed under multiple licenses including the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Lesser GNU General Public License (LGPL), and under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

The commercial version of the Eudora mail client was retired in October 2006. Now, a beta version of the new revitalized Eudora has just been released.