For many years I was a Eudora fan, using it to organise my email from upwards of 20 POP3 boxes. When I moved to IMAP I ended up using Mulberry, and it followed me onto the MacBook. I still have problems with the way Mulberry does some things (such as not rendering HTML mail, inline attachments, or being able to set ‘priority’ on outgoing emails) so it was with interest that I heard the first version of Penelope (aka Eudora 8) had been released, and I installed it eagerly.

Firstly, they’re very eager to state that it’s a complete rewrite, or to be more accurate it’s a hack of Thunderbird. However, I think I’d expected more than this – it did have a nice Eudora-y installer and a lovely set of icons, but other than that it was… well, Thunderbird. It’s also interesting to note that most of the bug reports on the Penelope tracker appear to be to do with keystrokes not doing the right things.

One final note: if you’re going to try this, back up your Thunderbird config first. Penelope very helpfully trampled all over my Thunderbird settings and left my NNTP reader in an almost unusable state.

2/10 – could try harder.