Pegasus Mail
Encyclopedia
Pegasus Mail is a donationware
(previously freeware
), proprietary
, email client that is developed and maintained by David Harris
and his team. It was originally released in 1990 for internal and external mail on Netware networks with MS-DOS
clients, and was subsequently ported to Microsoft Windows
. A version for Apple Macintosh also used to be available.
s. Pegasus Mail has minimal system requirements compared with competing products, for instance the installed program (excluding mailboxes) for version 4.52 requires only around 13.5 MB of hard drive space. Since Pegasus Mail does not make changes to the Windows registry
or the system directory, it is suitable as a portable application for USB drives. Language packs are available for languages other than English.
Some commentators have described Pegasus Mail as convoluted and cumbersome to configure, whereas others value Pegasus Mail for the features it offers. A key feature of Pegasus Mail is that it does not use the HTML
layout engine
that is installed with every Microsoft operating system
since 1997: The ubiquity of the Microsoft engine, which is used not only by all Microsoft products but by numerous 3rd party products as well, makes it a frequent target of malware
such as Melissa
and ILOVEYOU
. Mail clients such as Pegasus Mail that have their own HTML rendering engine are inherently immune to these security exploits. Pegasus Mail will also not execute automation commands (for example ActiveX
or JavaScript
) embedded in an e-mail, further reducing the chances of a security breach.
networks and their Message Handling System (MHS) mail system; a cut-down MHS-only version called FirstMail was bundled with NetWare. Early versions used only a non-standard format for mail folders; later versions offer the standard Unix mailbox format
as an alternative to the Pegasus Mail format. Although no longer developed or supported, older versions for MS-DOS
and Apple Macintosh are still available.
A problem with early versions is that mail was stored on the Netware System volume. This was not a problem when messages were brief text files. Later it was possible, although rather complicated, to store received mail on another volume, but new mail had to remain on System. This caused problems with Netware servers with a small System volume and larger ones for data storage, as users often kept many large messages in their new mail folders.
Pegasus Mail supports the POP3, IMAP, and SMTP protocols as well as Novell's MHS. Release 4.41 added support for filtering of spam
with header and body checking for key phrases (already before download). Release 4.41 also offers an improved HTML rendering engine
, better support for special character encoding (especially with UTF-8
), phishing
protection, a full-fledged Bayesian spam filter, and much more.
Pegasus Mail for Windows can be used as a standalone mail client using POP3 or IMAP for incoming mail and SMTP for outgoing, or on a Netware or Windows network in conjunction with the Mercury Mail Transport System
for Windows or Netware, also by David Harris, running on a network server to receive mail and distribute it to users. While Pegasus Mail and Mercury handle email only, the function of Pegasus Mail is comparable to Microsoft Outlook
's mail handling, and Mercury to Microsoft Exchange Server
.
since Windows 98
, and, the distribution of Microsoft Outlook
initially free of charge with PC magazines, and then as an integral part of Microsoft Office
, from 1997 dealt a significant blow to the market share of Pegasus Mail and other email clients, from which many never fully recovered.
Also, with the widespread distribution of Microsoft Outlook, user expectations of the range of features a program incorporating an email client should offer (Outlook's email, newsgroups, calendar, etc., eventually as part of an integrated suite) did not fulfill new users' expectations, regardless of the features of the email client proper. Trends in interface design have also changed throughout the years, and Pegasus Mail has not followed those changes, still having essentially the same user interface it had in its first Windows version, with very few later additions (such as the "preview window" mode).
Pegasus Mail for stand-alone machines was initially developed at a time when the typical email user had to be somewhat more knowledgeable of the way computers, the Internet and particularly email operate than most of today's users have to be, as PCs and the Internet have become more widespread, reached a broader audience and adapted themselves to those new users' needs. At the time Pegasus Mail was first conceived, its extensive array of features coupled with a simple user interface provided an ideal mix for most users' needs. As years went by it was seen as departing from the de-facto standard, and lacking features expected by the typical user.
The drop in usage and funding slowed development and features that were initially to be included in version 4 were not implemented. Some of these features are scheduled for inclusion in version 5.
A public beta test version of version 4.5http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/p45_index.html was announced on 3 October 2008 which is stated to be "very complete and stable, but is provided without formal technical support - you should almost certainly apply due diligence testing to it before using it in a production environment". The new version has not only been developed further beyond earlier versions, but has been ported from now obsolete v5.02 of Borland C++
to Microsoft Visual Studio
2008, a major undertaking in itself. A list of changes and other information is linked from here.
On 2 February 2009 David Harris said that bug reports from version 4.51 beta were being reviewed with the intention of getting a formal release out in the next few weeks.
On 19 June 2009 David Harris announced on the Pegasus Mail site that all development of Pegasus Mail and the associated Mercury program could only continue if sufficient users would commit to donating US$50 annually; on 21 July 2009 he said that there had been a good start.
On 3 July 2009 Pegasus Mail 4.51 (final) and Mercury/32 v4.72 were released.
On 23 January 2010 Pegasus Mail 4.52 (final) was released (includes improvements for Windows 7).
On 2 November 2010, David Harris posted the following message regarding the progress of development
on the newest release of Pegasus Mail, PMail Version 5.0 : "Progress continues on the new contacts manager for Pegasus Mail version 5. The new contact manager uses an SQL-based back-end for storage, and offers an incredibly rich range of attributes and options: it will exist alongside the now aging Pegasus Mail addressbook format, and while existing addressbooks will continue to work, there will also be options to import their contents into the new contact manager database. The new code has been designed heavily with external synchronization in mind, but at least initially, we will not be including any built-in synchronization clients: there is an extensive API that other developers can use to perform synchronization (down to the attribute level) though, and as real-world usage solidifies after release, we will evaluate what synchronization clients might be most appropriate to provide as standard options. We hope to release an initial version of Pegasus Mail version 5 with the new contact manager in place either late in December this year, or early in 2011. A subsequent version with the entirely-new message store I have been working on for over a year will follow at a later stage. I'm personally very excited about the new contact manager - I believe it could have an enormous impact on the way many people work in a world of e-mail overload"
On 23 February 2011 Pegasus Mail 4.61 was released. It includes a new HTML renderer which uses the built-in Windows renderer of Internet Explorer, but the BearHTML renderer has also been improved and can be used instead. V. 4.61 has new graphics, an updated interface, a number of smaller changes or improvements and various bug fixes.
On 6 September 2011, version 4.62, expected to be the last release before version 5, became available. This includes improvements to the editor and elsewhere, and bug fixes.
. However the SSL e-mail access in Pegasus Mail, running via Wine, currently does not work.
caused that program to automatically delete the executable file for Pegasus Mail for Windows, claiming that it was a virus "Trjan.Dropper". This erroneous identification was soon corrected in a subsequent virus definition update, but for about a day NAV users had difficulty installing or using Pegasus Mail.
Donationware
Donationware is a licensing model that supplies fully operational software to the user and pleads for an optional donation be paid to the programmer or a third-party beneficiary . The amount of the donation may also be stipulated by the author, or it may be left to the discretion of the user,...
(previously freeware
Freeware
Freeware is computer software that is available for use at no cost or for an optional fee, but usually with one or more restricted usage rights. Freeware is in contrast to commercial software, which is typically sold for profit, but might be distributed for a business or commercial purpose in the...
), proprietary
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
, email client that is developed and maintained by David Harris
David Harris (software developer)
David Harris is a software developer from Dunedin, New Zealand. He developed the Pegasus Mail client and the Mercury Mail Transport System, and is a former staff member of the University of Otago....
and his team. It was originally released in 1990 for internal and external mail on Netware networks with MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
clients, and was subsequently ported to Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
. A version for Apple Macintosh also used to be available.
Features
Pegasus Mail (PMail) is suitable for single or multiple users on stand-alone computers and for internal and Internet mail on local area networkLocal area network
A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...
s. Pegasus Mail has minimal system requirements compared with competing products, for instance the installed program (excluding mailboxes) for version 4.52 requires only around 13.5 MB of hard drive space. Since Pegasus Mail does not make changes to the Windows registry
Windows registry
The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...
or the system directory, it is suitable as a portable application for USB drives. Language packs are available for languages other than English.
Some commentators have described Pegasus Mail as convoluted and cumbersome to configure, whereas others value Pegasus Mail for the features it offers. A key feature of Pegasus Mail is that it does not use the HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
layout engine
Layout engine
A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
that is installed with every Microsoft operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
since 1997: The ubiquity of the Microsoft engine, which is used not only by all Microsoft products but by numerous 3rd party products as well, makes it a frequent target of malware
Malware
Malware, short for malicious software, consists of programming that is designed to disrupt or deny operation, gather information that leads to loss of privacy or exploitation, or gain unauthorized access to system resources, or that otherwise exhibits abusive behavior...
such as Melissa
Melissa (computer worm)
The Melissa virus, also known as "Mailissa", "Simpsons", "Kwyjibo", or "Kwejeebo", is a mass-mailing macro virus. As it is not a standalone program, it is not a worm.-History:...
and ILOVEYOU
ILOVEYOU
ILOVEYOU, also known as Love Letter, is a computer worm that successfully attacked tens of millions of computers in 2000 when it was sent as an attachment to a user with the text "ILOVEYOU" in the subject line. The worm arrived e-mail on and after May 4, 2000 with the simple subject of "ILOVEYOU"...
. Mail clients such as Pegasus Mail that have their own HTML rendering engine are inherently immune to these security exploits. Pegasus Mail will also not execute automation commands (for example ActiveX
ActiveX
ActiveX is a framework for defining reusable software components in a programming language-independent way. Software applications can then be composed from one or more of these components in order to provide their functionality....
or JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
) embedded in an e-mail, further reducing the chances of a security breach.
Supported protocols
The original version worked with Novell NetWareNovell NetWare
NetWare is a network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, with network protocols based on the archetypal Xerox Network Systems stack....
networks and their Message Handling System (MHS) mail system; a cut-down MHS-only version called FirstMail was bundled with NetWare. Early versions used only a non-standard format for mail folders; later versions offer the standard Unix mailbox format
Mbox
mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of electronic mail messages. All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single file...
as an alternative to the Pegasus Mail format. Although no longer developed or supported, older versions for MS-DOS
MS-DOS
MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...
and Apple Macintosh are still available.
A problem with early versions is that mail was stored on the Netware System volume. This was not a problem when messages were brief text files. Later it was possible, although rather complicated, to store received mail on another volume, but new mail had to remain on System. This caused problems with Netware servers with a small System volume and larger ones for data storage, as users often kept many large messages in their new mail folders.
Pegasus Mail supports the POP3, IMAP, and SMTP protocols as well as Novell's MHS. Release 4.41 added support for filtering of spam
E-mail spam
Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...
with header and body checking for key phrases (already before download). Release 4.41 also offers an improved HTML rendering engine
Rendering engine
Rendering engine may refer to:*Game engine, a software system designed for the creation and development of video games*Ray tracing , a technique for generating an image by tracing simulated rays of light...
, better support for special character encoding (especially with UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
), phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
protection, a full-fledged Bayesian spam filter, and much more.
Pegasus Mail for Windows can be used as a standalone mail client using POP3 or IMAP for incoming mail and SMTP for outgoing, or on a Netware or Windows network in conjunction with the Mercury Mail Transport System
Mercury Mail Transport System
Mercury Mail Transport System is a standards-compliant donationware mail server developed by David Harris, who also develops the Pegasus Mail client....
for Windows or Netware, also by David Harris, running on a network server to receive mail and distribute it to users. While Pegasus Mail and Mercury handle email only, the function of Pegasus Mail is comparable to Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...
's mail handling, and Mercury to Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Exchange Server
Microsoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...
.
Criticism of features
Pegasus Mail pioneered many features now taken for granted with other email clients, such as filtering and simultaneous access to multiple POP3 and IMAP accounts, and continues to out-perform many other email clients. However, the free distribution of Microsoft Outlook Express or later email client as a standard part of Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
since Windows 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...
, and, the distribution of Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite...
initially free of charge with PC magazines, and then as an integral part of Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
, from 1997 dealt a significant blow to the market share of Pegasus Mail and other email clients, from which many never fully recovered.
Also, with the widespread distribution of Microsoft Outlook, user expectations of the range of features a program incorporating an email client should offer (Outlook's email, newsgroups, calendar, etc., eventually as part of an integrated suite) did not fulfill new users' expectations, regardless of the features of the email client proper. Trends in interface design have also changed throughout the years, and Pegasus Mail has not followed those changes, still having essentially the same user interface it had in its first Windows version, with very few later additions (such as the "preview window" mode).
Pegasus Mail for stand-alone machines was initially developed at a time when the typical email user had to be somewhat more knowledgeable of the way computers, the Internet and particularly email operate than most of today's users have to be, as PCs and the Internet have become more widespread, reached a broader audience and adapted themselves to those new users' needs. At the time Pegasus Mail was first conceived, its extensive array of features coupled with a simple user interface provided an ideal mix for most users' needs. As years went by it was seen as departing from the de-facto standard, and lacking features expected by the typical user.
Advanced features
In spite of all criticism, Pegasus Mail's "old-fashioned" approach can be a blessing for advanced, "power" users with complex email usage patterns and/or who need special features. For those niche users, Pegasus Mail remains a top choice, with many powerful features rarely present in other email clients. Some examples include:- support to three encoding standards (MIMEMIMEMultipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is an Internet standard that extends the format of email to support:* Text in character sets other than ASCII* Non-text attachments* Message bodies with multiple parts...
, uuencoding and BinHexBinHexBinHex, short for "binary-to-hexadecimal", is a binary-to-text encoding system that was used on the Mac OS for sending binary files through e-mail. It is similar to Uuencode, but combined both "forks" of the Mac file system together, along with extended file information...
); - an extremely powerful filtering system, so much that it is possible to run a fully automated client-based electronic mailing listElectronic mailing listAn electronic mailing list is a special usage of email that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. It is similar to a traditional mailing list — a list of names and addresses — as might be kept by an organization for sending publications to...
(including processing subscriptions, unsubscriptions and forwards to moderation) using solely Pegasus Mail for that; - the ability to automatically select which email address to send a reply from, based on the mail folder containing the original received message;
- the ability to include custom e-mail header lines (useful for tracking emails, for example);
- the ability to delete attachments without deleting the message's text body, or to delete the HTML version of a message while keeping the plain-text version (or vice versa), allowing the user to save disk space;
- easy access to the raw content of a message through the "Raw view" tab, something which is difficult or impossible in some other clients;
- a "tree view" of the structure of a multipart message with all its sections and attachments, giving access to view or save any of the parts separately.
The drop in usage and funding slowed development and features that were initially to be included in version 4 were not implemented. Some of these features are scheduled for inclusion in version 5.
Development status of Pegasus Mail
Until 2006 all versions of Pegasus Mail were supplied free of charge, and printed user manuals were available for purchase. In January 2007 it was announced that distribution and development of Pegasus Mail had ceased due to inadequate financial support from the sale of the manuals. Later in the month, due to an avalanche of support from the user community, it was announced that development will resume. However, Pegasus Mail will change from freeware to donationware and Mercury will change to a licence for fee for configurations with more than a certain number of email boxes. A donation button was added to the website on 1 March 2007.A public beta test version of version 4.5http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/p45_index.html was announced on 3 October 2008 which is stated to be "very complete and stable, but is provided without formal technical support - you should almost certainly apply due diligence testing to it before using it in a production environment". The new version has not only been developed further beyond earlier versions, but has been ported from now obsolete v5.02 of Borland C++
Borland C++
Borland C++ is a C and C++ programming environment for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. It was the successor to Turbo C++, and included a better debugger, the Turbo Debugger, which was written in protected mode DOS....
to Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment from Microsoft. It is used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with Windows Forms applications, web sites, web applications, and web services in both native code together with managed code for all...
2008, a major undertaking in itself. A list of changes and other information is linked from here.
On 2 February 2009 David Harris said that bug reports from version 4.51 beta were being reviewed with the intention of getting a formal release out in the next few weeks.
On 19 June 2009 David Harris announced on the Pegasus Mail site that all development of Pegasus Mail and the associated Mercury program could only continue if sufficient users would commit to donating US$50 annually; on 21 July 2009 he said that there had been a good start.
On 3 July 2009 Pegasus Mail 4.51 (final) and Mercury/32 v4.72 were released.
On 23 January 2010 Pegasus Mail 4.52 (final) was released (includes improvements for Windows 7).
On 2 November 2010, David Harris posted the following message regarding the progress of development
on the newest release of Pegasus Mail, PMail Version 5.0 : "Progress continues on the new contacts manager for Pegasus Mail version 5. The new contact manager uses an SQL-based back-end for storage, and offers an incredibly rich range of attributes and options: it will exist alongside the now aging Pegasus Mail addressbook format, and while existing addressbooks will continue to work, there will also be options to import their contents into the new contact manager database. The new code has been designed heavily with external synchronization in mind, but at least initially, we will not be including any built-in synchronization clients: there is an extensive API that other developers can use to perform synchronization (down to the attribute level) though, and as real-world usage solidifies after release, we will evaluate what synchronization clients might be most appropriate to provide as standard options. We hope to release an initial version of Pegasus Mail version 5 with the new contact manager in place either late in December this year, or early in 2011. A subsequent version with the entirely-new message store I have been working on for over a year will follow at a later stage. I'm personally very excited about the new contact manager - I believe it could have an enormous impact on the way many people work in a world of e-mail overload"
On 23 February 2011 Pegasus Mail 4.61 was released. It includes a new HTML renderer which uses the built-in Windows renderer of Internet Explorer, but the BearHTML renderer has also been improved and can be used instead. V. 4.61 has new graphics, an updated interface, a number of smaller changes or improvements and various bug fixes.
On 6 September 2011, version 4.62, expected to be the last release before version 5, became available. This includes improvements to the editor and elsewhere, and bug fixes.
Community Support Site
An official community Support site for Pegasus Mail was opened in May 2007 at community.pmail.com. The site offers monitored forums for shared technical support and blogs from the developers.Pegasus Mail Wiki
Starting February 2009, Pegasus Mail has its own WIKI, used as an on-line knowledge resource, located at http://wiki.pmail.com/Linux and Pegasus Mail
Requests have been made for a Linux version of Pegasus Mail, but it's still unclear as of April 2005 whether a Linux version will be developed. The Pegasus Mail WIKI has received unofficial confirmation from several Linux users that Pegasus Mail works in Linux using WineWine (software)
Wine is a free software application that aims to allow computer programs written for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like...
. However the SSL e-mail access in Pegasus Mail, running via Wine, currently does not work.
Pegasus Mail blocked by Norton AntiVirus
On May 17, 2007, an update to Norton AntiVirusNorton AntiVirus
Norton AntiVirus, developed and distributed by Symantec Corporation, provides malware prevention and removal during a subscription period. It uses signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features include e-mail spam filtering and phishing protection.Symantec distributes the product as...
caused that program to automatically delete the executable file for Pegasus Mail for Windows, claiming that it was a virus "Trjan.Dropper". This erroneous identification was soon corrected in a subsequent virus definition update, but for about a day NAV users had difficulty installing or using Pegasus Mail.
See also
- Comparison of e-mail clientsComparison of e-mail clientsThe following tables compare general and technical features of a number of email client programs. Please see the individual products articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up to date.-General:...
- Comparison of feed aggregatorsComparison of feed aggregatorsThe following is a comparison of notable RSS feed aggregators. Often e-mail programs and web browsers have the ability to display RSS feeds. They are listed here, too.Many BitTorrent clients support RSS feeds for broadcatching ....
- Mercury Mail Transport SystemMercury Mail Transport SystemMercury Mail Transport System is a standards-compliant donationware mail server developed by David Harris, who also develops the Pegasus Mail client....