Qualcomm is to stop selling Eudora, the venerable email client, and is hand over development to the Mozilla Foundation.

This makes a deal of sense: Qualcomm always was a strange home for Eudora - it does cell phone chips, not desktop software.

In future, Eudora will be free and open source - while "retaining Eudora's uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements". And it will share the same cross-platform code base as the Thunderbird, Mozilla's open-source email program. Hopefully, this will mean improvements to Thunderbird, as well as greater stability for Eudora.

Quallcomm today also announced the final editions of Eudora for Windows and Mac in its current form. The open source version is expected in the first half of next year.

In the meantime, Qualcomm will continue to sell 'classic' Eudora at the cut-rate price of $19.95, complete with six months tech support. We don't anticipate a huge rush to the sales floor. The company says it will switch off ads in the free, ad-supported version sometime next year.

Press release here. And FAQ for Eudora users here. ®