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Thunderbird Overview

CIT has added Thunderbird to its list of fully-supported e-mail clients. (The other clients are Eudora, WebMail, and the uPortal.Cornell e-mail channel. See our E-mail Comparison page for more information.)

While we will continue to support Eudora, we are encouraging all incoming students, new faculty, and new staff to use Thunderbird instead. Faculty and staff who are currently using Eudora are urged to contact your local technical support staff to see if switching to Thunderbird makes sense for you.

Why are we supporting Thunderbird, and what's wrong with Eudora? In evaluating full-featured e-mail clients, CIT, along with the ITMC, FABIT, and CCD, considered the following features and capabilities:

  • Cross-platform (Windows / Macintosh / Linux)
  • Kerberos support
  • SSL support
  • Authenticated SMTP support
  • POP support
  • IMAP support
  • Standard files (for easier recovery)
  • LDAP (as implemented at Cornell) support
  • Multiple accounts/personalities
  • Unicode support
  • Junk/Spam filters

Thunderbird is the only client we identified that includes everything on that list.

Eudora has been supported at Cornell for several years, and works well for most users, but recent releases have made us nervous about putting all our eggs in the Eudora basket.

  • Some Eudora-IMAP users report that messages have become corrupted or that they are deleted without an action by the user.
  • Eudora does not support Unicode, which is critical for a global environment like Cornell.
  • Eudora on Windows is different in many ways from Eudora on the Macintosh, which makes support more difficult. Eudora is not available for Linux users.

Update

Qualcomm has announced that it has released the final commerical version of Eudora, and will be moving to an open-source product (to be called Penelope) based on Mozilla Thunderbird. This free version is targeted for release in "the first half of 2007." We believe that they will discontinue support for the current version about a year later.

CIT will continue to support Eudora, but we encourage everyone in the Cornell community to contact their technical support folks and ask if switching to Thunderbird is the right choice, given their e-mail needs.

 

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Last updated: May 23, 2007