Why Use Pegasus Mail?

Pegasus Mail is a donationware (previously freeware), proprietary, electronic mail client that was developed and maintained by David Harris and his team. It was originally released in 1990 for MS-DOS, but was subsequently ported to Microsoft Windows. A version for Apple Macintosh also used to be available. On January 3, 2007, it was announced that development of Pegasus Mail was suspended due to dwindling financial support. Then on January 22, 2007 it was announced that development would be resumed on Pegasus Mail as donationware and Mercury (email server) and a licence fee for installations with more than a base number of mail boxes.

Pegasus Mail (PMail) is suitable for single or multiple users on stand-alone computers or on local area networks. Pegasus is extremely feature-rich and powerful, yet remains small and fast: for version 4.41, the setup program is just under 7 MB in size, while the installed program (mailboxes not included) takes about 13.5 MB. Since Pegasus Mail does not make changes to the Windows registry when installed, it is suitable as a portable application for USB drives. For languages other than English, there are language packs available.

Some commentators have described Pegasus Mail as convoluted and cumbersome to configure, whereas others value Pegasus for the features it offers. A key feature of Pegasus 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.

Pegasus Mail supports the POP3, IMAP, and SMTP protocols as well as Novell's MHS. The current version has added support for filtering of spam with header and body checking for key phrases (already before download). The latest 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 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 as a standard part of Microsoft Windows since Windows 98, and, the free distribution of Microsoft Outlook with PC magazines and then as an integral part of Microsoft Office from 1997 onwards dealt a significant blow to the market share of Pegasus 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 an email client should offer (Outlook's email, newsgroups, calendar, etc., eventually as part of an integrated suite) created a negative first impression for many coming to an e-mail only program, no matter how good the email-only program was. 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 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, its concept became somewhat dissociated from the expectations of the average user.

As of version 4.41, for example, Pegasus Mail still does not allow writing HTML messages, even though it can display received messages in HTML (with varying degrees of faithfulness, because due to security concerns it uses its own limited rendering engine, rather than an embedded browser's one). It can also compose formatted-text messages using Rich Text Format. It should be noted, however, that Pegasus Mail's design philosophy tries to avoid any potential security issue, and HTML email is notoriously controversial in many respects.

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 (MIME, UUencoding and BinHex);
• an extremely powerful filtering system, so much that it is possible to run a fully automated client-based electronic mailing list (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, which is expected in late 2007 or early 2008.