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The internet, driven by clients like Gmail, has largely abandoned bottom posting in email clients, in favor of top posting, but there are still many partisans out there.

Bottom posting of replies: Perhaps the most controversial feature of Eudora-reflecting an era in which many internet users posted in Usenet newsgroups or listservs-was the concept of “bottom posting,” or putting replies below the original message, rather than above.

Eudora made it possible to do this with its “redirect” function-something most email clients don’t support today.

The ability to “redirect” emails, rather than forward: Forwarding emails is a common functionality of email clients, of course, but it always gets dicey when, say, you want to send a message to someone, but encourage them to respond to the original sender, rather than you.

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In a 1995 episode of the PBS series Computer Chronicles, New York Times reporter John Markoff explained that the filtering capability made it possible for him to parse thousands of messages daily-including one from Steve Jobs that he humblebragged about during the episode.

Fine-toothed filtering: Eudora had the ability to filter out spam, yes, but it was also designed to filter messages with great amounts of detail and sophistication-think Gmail’s search options, but even more in the weeds.

“Any feature in the menu list, any action there, can be added as a button.” (Wozniak, remember, made an incredibly nerdy remote control.) “The reason I do is, it has an incredible feature that every single mail client should have,” he emphasized. He told Lifehacker (in friggin’ 2009!) that he believed it was the most important productivity tool he had. For this reason, Eudora was Steve Wozniak’s favorite client.

High customization capabilities: Eudora was an incredibly flexible client for its time, allowing users to tweak it in any way they wanted, allowing for both scripting and sophisticated actions.

Soon enough, Qualcomm would move to naming football stadiums for that type of name recognition-and Eudora became the app of choice for power users, perhaps at the cost of the broader internet.įive things Eudora has that most modern email clients don’t

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Eudora was a loss leader of sorts-while it had a shrink-wrapped version, most people used the free one, and the success of the free app gave Qualcomm name recognition at a time when it was still pretty obscure. He got a long-term gig out of the move, obviously, but it meant that his idea was at the whims of a large company that was better known for designing communications hardware than email clients. (Side note: This is why you should never create something you truly care about under a work-for-hire structure, because you won’t own it.) Dorner’s main job for many years was maintaining Eudora.

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Andreessen was a student at UIUC when he created NCSA Mosaic in 1993, while Dorner was an employee when he built Eudora in 1988.Īndreessen rebuilt the software under a new name (Netscape) and ownership structure Dorner didn’t.Īnd while Andreessen moved to California, Dorner stayed in Illinois, telecommuting for Qualcomm, which eventually acquired his work from the university, for years. The reason is simple: There were some differences in what Andreessen and Dorner had done. (Not that Dorner appeared to mind: “To have other people use and enjoy your program is probably what a certain breed of programmer is really interested in,” he told the news outlet at the time. Of the early protocols that ruled the ‘net, the web and email were the two most important ones-and UIUC was a proving ground for both.īut the Times only showed up at Dorner’s door for a piece about why he had failed to become a multi-millionaire for what he created-which one could say is a backhanded compliment of an article. In contrast, Eudora maker Steve Dorner created an incredibly popular program, loved by power users at a time when power users owned the internet. Netscape, of course, helped its creator, Marc Andreessen, eventually become a billionaire, and drove a Silicon Valley boom that we’re still seeing some reverberations of to this day-in part because Andreessen leveraged his financial success into further financial success and later, a plum role as a venture capitalist. The other, Eudora, put a graphical twist on email.

One of those applications, Netscape, became a bedrock of how we surf the web. In early 1997, two applications were in the process of taking over the internet, and both had roots in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was a contrast that was too delicious for The New York Times to ignore. ( via Amazon) Eudora was a success story, but not one that made its creator rich Join the ten million other Eudora users, the box says.