I arrive, with heavy heart, at the conclusion that you're a bit thick.

Actually, I'm quite thin. ;)

"We intend to produce a version of Eudora that is open source and based on Mozilla and Thunderbird."

Now, "we intend to produce" is future tense. That means it doesn't really exist yet.

That part I got, that it didn't exist yet.

"based on Mozilla and Thunderbird" would mean "not based on the existing Eudora code", because then it wouldn't be "based on Mozilla and Thunderbird".

I didn't really (and still don't) quite get "based on" as a computer term. I know that open source means other people can tweak it as they choose or so, but I didn't know what "based on" meant in terms of the existing program or the new one it talks about producing.

Thanks for explaining it some though. John says that Qualcomm stopped using Eudora's existing code, and with Qualcomm's blessing, some other people created a product that looks like the existing Eudora, by making a completely different Eudora using Mozilla's existing code. I still don't exactly get that you can make one program out of another's code, but hey, that's why I'm not a programmer, and John is, as well as many of you. ;)

If it "replaced your Eudora" so that you "have" to upgrade (why would you "have" to upgrade? Would your existing client explode in a violent logic-bomb type affair?), don't you think the page would say "we have produced a replacement for Eudora that is open yadda yadda blah blah, and you need to replace your Eudora"?

Not necessarily, because as you said, it isn't available yet. They probably wouldn't want to tell us we have to upgrade until they were ready to do it.

John said that it is possible they could stop allowing my current Eudora to work, and that they would most certainly no longer produce any further Eudora's based on the one I use. So mine could become obsolete and unusable. I still have the ad based version that has to connect to the site to run properly even though they haven't sent any ads in a long time now. It's already unsupported, because Eudora dropped all support of the commercial version that is out. John says they want nothing more to do with it. I can't even buy the non-ad version anymore, and if the ad server ever stops talking to my Eudora, John says that could possibly cause my Eudora to refuse to work.

Fortunately, he also told me they tend to warn us with a warning message in advance before causing the failure of the program, so that might give me enough time to save everything out of there that isn't already saved. I can also hope that the new Eudora being created will allow for a transfer from the old one of files and directories and address books. Guess I'd better start considering saving the rest down to the hard drive as soon as it's feasible.

Are you sure you're safe to be on the interhyperworldwideweb unsupervised?

Of course, because I don't do any unsupervised downloading. ;)

Brenda