What company acquired the Eudora email client in 1991?

The company that acquired the Eudora email client in 1991 was Qualcomm. Eudora was created by Steve Dorner in 1988 while he worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, initially as a Macintosh email program.

The name Eudora honored American author Eudora Welty, whose short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” inspired the software’s name and its early slogan, “Bringing the P.O. to Where You Live.” Qualcomm’s acquisition brought the product into a commercial technology company and helped turn it into one of the best-known desktop email clients of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Under Qualcomm, Eudora was offered in several business models. Users could choose a free version, a paid Pro edition, or, for a period, an advertising-supported Sponsored mode. Qualcomm also developed separate Mac and Windows versions, whose teams used different programming languages and development approaches.

Qualcomm ended development of the mainline Windows product in 2006 and later sponsored an open-source successor based on Mozilla Thunderbird. In 2018, the Computer History Museum acquired Eudora’s source code, trademarks, copyrights, and domain names from Qualcomm.