[Macpartners] Future Plans for Eudora 5.2.3 and 6.x

[Bryant C. Vernon]

Dear Colleagues,

The Eudora Release Team and the Software Release Team (SWRT) have received a few emails inquiring into our plans for Eudora 6.x. Most of these emails 
highlight Eudora 6's new spam filtering capabilities and recommend that we release it to the MIT community. Some of the emails even expressed confusion as to why we haven't started a release effort already. Given our dedication to customer service and keeping our customers informed about new software and the reasons behind our decisions whether to pursue a release effort for them, we decided to take the atypical course of action and update the community on a product that, as of yet, is not slated to be released to the MIT community.

First of all, I would like to point out that we released Eudora 5.2.x within the last three months. This version of Eudora contained the crucial new functionality of enabling SMTP authentication via both Kerberos and username / password combo over an SSL encrypted connection. Recently, we saw the necessity of having this functionality in place when AOL temporarily blacklisted MIT from relaying mail to its servers because MIT permitted the relay of unauthenticated messages. Fortunately, we worked to appease AOL and made some changes to our email servers that although not requiring authentication (a change that would have meant denying all unauthenticated relay requests, whether valid or not, and would undoubtedly have confused many customers due to the suddenness of the change) did address spammers' use of spoofed MIT email addresses. Fortunately, however, had AOL required that we require authentication, we had a client capable of doing so.

Over the past three months, we have identified three problems with our version of Eudora 5.2.x. First, the registration does not always properly function on an upgrade, so Eudora sometimes prompts users for the registration information after the upgrade. Second, on Mac OS X the server port for SMTP authentication was not set properly during an upgrade from 5.2 to 5.2.3, so users received an error when attempting to use SMTP authentication. Third, under OS 10.3 (Panther), users must manually enter their personal certificate in order to authenticate with our mail servers. To address these problems, the SWRT decided to release an updated installer of Eudora 5.2.x. We are currently working on making these changes and plan to have an updated installer ready by early January.

This decision obviously invites the question: why not bypass updating the Eudora 5.2.x installers completely and just release Eudora 6.x? The main reasons for proceeding with this release are: 
a) junk mail filtering looks promising for MIT community members who do not access their email through the MIT email servers or who want more control over junk mail filtering rules. Testing is needed, however, to verify the benefit of this feature. 
b) content concentrater can reduce the amount of time necessary for parsing through threaded discussions 
c) HESIOD once again works for Windows users. 

However, despite these promising additions, Eudora 6.x also has its downsides. When Qualcomm initially released Eudora 6.x, the SWRT and Mac Development Teams reviewed the product and found that the interactions between MIT's spam filtering and Eudora's junk mail filtering produced non-intuitive results. The interactions, in fact, were quite complex, and we deemed them too complex to benefit the average user without his investing a number of hours reading over the documentation for the the junk mail settings and gaining a better understanding of Spam Assassin. Furthermore, we have yet to determine how much value the built in junk filtering would provide, even if we could get it to work with Spam Assassin in a relatively simple and straightforward way. As for the content concentrator and HESIOD support--given the complexities of the junk mail system, we did not consider the content concentrator a compelling new feature on its own, and the HESIOD support we only discovered recently (within the past week--the bug fix was not listed in the release notes). Thus, despite a feature list, particularly the native junk mail filtering settings, Eudora 6.x proved to have its downsides that made us question the large incremental cost (in time, effort, and resources) of releasing Eudora 6.x over a modified installer of Eudora 5.2.x. The difference, in time alone, is roughly 2-2.5 months.

Now, having made the previous conclusion, the future of Eudora 6.x looks dismal. But, because of customer feedback, we have decided not only to go ahead with a release of an updated Eudora 5.2.x installer, but to also continue looking into Eudora 6.x to see if we can demistify the junk mail settings for the average user, confirm that the content concentrator is useful, and ensure that HESIOD works consistently. Furthermore, we plan to investigate enhancements to IMAP functionality to see if they too can help bolster the business case for releasing Eudora 6.x. This investigative process will occur over the next month and will either lead directly into an accellerated release process or to an email explaining the reasons we decided against its release.

If you have any questions regarding these decisions and/or our plan of action, please feel free to email the Eudora release team at eudora-release at mit.edu. We appreciate any feedback you may have.

All the Best,
Bryant C. Vernon
Eudora Product Release Coordinator
Software Release Team
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/macpartners/attachments/20031201/47bea78f/attachment.htm