A Eulogy for Eudora

Today in Tedium: Email is such a pain in the butt. (Hopefully not this specific email.) We’ve been doing everything in our power to fight the influence it has on our lives, to minimize the spam, the marketing, the burden. That burden leads lots of folks to fruitlessly hunt for the perfect email client like I hunt for the perfect word processor. Others have followed the path of least resistance: Either Gmail or Outlook. But there was a time when we didn’t feel this way, when getting email was actually exciting. The email client Eudora, named for Eudora Welty, was designed to capture this excitement—the idea that mailboxes were no longer tethered to physical space. But even as the die-hards held on, it couldn’t. Tonight’s Tedium ponders the demise of Eudora, and whether we lost something great. — Ernie @ Tedium

Editor’s note: Tonight’s GIF comes from a Computer Chronicles episode and stars John Markoff’s inbox.

Join the ten million other Eudora users, the box says. (via Amazon)

Eudora was a success story, but not one that made its creator rich

It was a contrast that was too delicious for The New York Times to ignore.

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. One of those applications, Netscape, became a bedrock of how we surf the web. The other, Eudora, put a graphical twist on email.

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.

In contrast, Eudora maker Steve Dorner created an incredibly popular program, loved by power users at a time when power users owned the internet. 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.

But 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.

(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. “That’s the ultimate reward.”)

The reason is simple: There were some differences in what Andreessen and Dorner had done. Andreessen was a student at UIUC when he created NCSA Mosaic in 1993, while Dorner was an employee when he built Eudora in 1988.

Andreessen rebuilt the software under a new name (Netscape) and ownership structure; Dorner didn’t.

And while Andreessen moved to California, Dorner stayed in Illinois, telecommuting for Qualcomm, which eventually acquired his work from the university, for years. Dorner’s main job for many years was maintaining Eudora.

(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.)

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. 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.

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.

A version of Eudora for Windows. (via Queen Mary University of London)

Eudora was great, but it was way more than most users needed

“If an e-mail program can survive the merciless scrutiny of the internet community, it’s got to be good,” a 1995 ad promoting Eudora stated.

Certainly, from a distance, this sounds like a good way to promote a piece of software like this. Lots of people use it, therefore it’s good.

The problem with this line of thought is that the merciless scrutiny of the 1995 internet means something different than the scrutiny of the 2017 internet.

For one thing, there’s more people. And on top of that, getting online in 1995 required more technical knowledge than it does now, especially if you wanted to use a graphical interface. Back then, before you could even get going on Windows, you had to set up the ability to connect to the internet using Trumpet Winsock, a networking tool for Windows 3.1 that allowed users to connect directly to the ’net before Microsoft added it to Windows itself.

Winsock, intentionally or not, was a great way of naturally filtering out people whose skills didn’t meet a certain level. Those who couldn’t figure it out could just use AOL.

The technical hurdles of internet access were later solved, of course, and that meant later generations of internet users—the people who failed the Winsock test in prior versions of Windows—needed more help from their email clients.

Customization was great for people who could wrap their heads around something like Winsock, but later internet users simply wanted things to work—and that led them to the arms of webmail clients like Hotmail.

In a 2015 interview with blogger Joe Clark, Dorner made the point that later internet users were less interested in customization than something that worked out of the box. Combined with the growing flood going into our inboxes, our collective philosophy around email had simply changed.

“ lot of the sort of later development of Eudora was all about harm reduction, really,” he explained. “It was about trying to get rid of the incredible volume of spam. … And, you know, people increasingly didn’t want to put in the time to sort things themselves, to manage things, to learn anything. They just wanted it all to be what they wanted without them having any hands-on.”

(Dorner added that modern users are less sophisticated these days, noting that “a lot of what is in the basic DNA of the Internet assumes more competence” than many users have.)

His interviewer is not unbiased on the issue of email. Clark, like a lot of folks who used Eudora back in the day, says the modern users missed out on the good stuff.

“You don’t know what’s possible; you don’t know what you’re missing,” Clark wrote.

We probably don’t. With smartphones our most common email vector these days, we’ve had to simplify our messaging needs, rely more on machine learning and artificial intelligence to figure out what we don’t want to see, and embrace that while we can customize some things, we’re mostly putting our trust in Microsoft, Google, or some random startup to get things right.

Eudora was a room full of knobs, perfect for tweaking to your heart’s content. But we’re in an era in which it’s preferable to hide the knobs away—whether or not that’s wise.