The mission will be known as the Penelope project"The first Thunderbird-based release of Eudora is expected to be made available in the
first half of 2007 and will be both free and open-source. According to the press release, it will retain "Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements". Thunderbird and Eudora will remain separate products, though they may benefit from common improvements in the future.
The mission to migrate Eudora to a Thunderbird-based application will be known as the Penelope project. A rough roadmap has been produced, envisaging three initial releases: 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0. Each release will progressively reimplement more Eudora features, with 1.0 being a suitable replacement for most current users. Qualcomm has assigned six employees to the Penelope project, including original Eudora developer Steve Dorner, who started working on the program in 1988, three years before it was purchased by Qualcomm."
Source: mozillaZine"The "Penelope" project's intention is to join the Eudora® user experience with the Mozilla platform. We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on mozilla and Thunderbird. It's *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it. We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with Thunderbird. It is our goal to build a single development community around Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they previously have.""
Roadmap Release 0.1 - a bare-minimum release!- Importers for your mail store and contacts
- Remapping of accelerator keys
- Basic settings and personalities
Release 0.5 - useable by adventurous Eudorans!- Filter importing
- Major UI Elements
- Unique Eudora message handling operations
Release 1.0 - comfortable for vast majority- Stationery
- Import for all Settings
- Minor UI elements
The core members of the Penelope project are currently: Steve Dorner, QUALCOMM®, original author of Eudora for Macintosh
Jeff Beckley, QUALCOMM, original co-author of Eudora for Windows
Dale Wiggins, QUALCOMM, longtime Eudora developer
Geoffrey Wenger, QUALCOMM, longtime Eudora developer
Matt Dudziak, QUALCOMM, longtime Eudora project manager
Mark Charlebois, QUALCOMM, Linux developer and Thunderbird user
Source: Penelope - MozillaWiki