It’s about two weeks too late for me, but the most important bug blocking Eudora to Thunderbird migration (bug 3157) has been fixed! This is excellent news for anyone out there using Eudora who’s ready to ditch it. I believe that the University of Chicago may be considering deploying Thunderbird (and Firefox) in the future, and their current userbase is primarily using Eudora. The fact that this bug is now fixed removes a big blocker for them. Attachment names are also now converted properly, which is also a very positive development (bug 242953).
They’re planning on shipping preview versions of Thunderbird and Firefox to students this September as optional unsupported software. They’re likely to be shipping Thunderbird 0.7.2/0.7.1 and Firefox 0.9.2/0.9.1 on their connectivity package CD. Unfortunately they won’t have the fix I mentioned, but when they redeploy in September 2005, the fix will be in, and I’m hopeful that Thunderbird/Firefox will replace Eudora/Mozilla as their officially supported applications. They’re certainly evaluating this possibility.
Thunderbird is an excellent email client, but before it’s really ready for primetime adoption, it also needs to be excellent at importing mail/addresses from other email clients. I’m glad to see that it’s getting there.