
Pegasus Mail - bane
http://www.pmail.com/
======
hackuser
Thunderbird also seems to be facing a massive rewrite.[0] Are there any good
FLOSS, local (with a local mail store, if desired), cross-platform, secure
(with security protocols implemented) email clients that support standard
features and have a reliable future? And any of those that I could give to
non-technical end users?

I know the names of a few, but I haven't tried them: Sylpheed, Claws,
Evolution (cross-platform?), Kmail (cross-platform?), N1 by Nylon, MailPile
(FLOSS?) ...

[0] See this discussion, for example: [https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-
planning/2017-March/00...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-
planning/2017-March/005298.html)

~~~
VSpike
A friend of mine swears by
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System)

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jasonjayr
There's a developer news update for April 2017:

[http://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm](http://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm)

~~~
Valodim
I really wasn't sure whether this post is an April fool's joke at first.
Besides the WaP lightheartednes, the list of things he has already done sound
like a _huge_ amount of work. Assuming he just ricked me with the date, what a
trooper! Kudos

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hyyypr
Unrelated but their website is remarkably well rendered in w3m.

[http://imgur.com/a/QOdMd](http://imgur.com/a/QOdMd)

~~~
drannex
If I had just seen that, I would have just assumed that _was_ the site!

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ryanmarsh
Check out the email etiquette page
[http://www.pmail.com/etqtte.htm](http://www.pmail.com/etqtte.htm)

~~~
Waterluvian
"This will often help a postmaster recognize the real recipient of the message
if the address is invalid."

There were services where humans actually sometimes tried to manually route an
email?

~~~
sundvor
You must be new here. postmaster@domain.tld used to be working mailboxes. :)

EDIT: Ah,
[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html](http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2821.html)
states it should still be so.

~~~
bradknowles
See also the USENIX Short Topics in System Administration booklets,
specifically "#15: Internet Postmaster: Duties and Responsibilities".

Sigh.

~~~
sundvor
Cool - I just tested sending an email to postmaster@ my Fastmail domain, and
they had indeed implemented a redirect to my username@. Smiles :)

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shdon
Heh, I still use Pegasus as my primary email client. Not so much because I
really like it (though I can't say that I dislike it, as I've gotten used to
it in the past 21 years), but mostly because I haven't found any other email
clients that are better. Pegasus Mail is quite slow with IMAP even on a LAN
and has some weird issues, but its mail filtering ability is really flexible.
I've tried Thunderbird, Sylpheed, Outlook, Outlook Express, even Windows Mail
and Apple Mail, and every one of those annoys me no end. For me, Pegasus Mail
is not necessarily the best, but still the route of least annoyance.

~~~
dddw
give mailmate (osx) a spin, has nice filtering options

~~~
shdon
Thanks, I'll give it a try. I only use Mac OS at work, though, where my needs
are a little different.

In the documentation for MailMate, I don't see the kind of filtering that I
use with Pegasus Mail. This is one of the things I miss most in all other
clients: I prefer to collect the mails in my inbox, without filtering. When I
close the inbox, Pegasus runs a large ruleset with hundreds of rules, moving
all the read mail to archive folders and leaving the unread mail in the inbox.
I've not yet seen any other client capable of doing this.

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itomato
>The other major issue with Pegasus Mail is that it uses a proprietary third-
party product as its core editor, and I would not be able to take that product
with me into an Open Source environment.

Portability issues aside, that's a questionable foundation.

~~~
mseebach
Yeah, it seems a bit short sighted that he didn't just grab one of the many
free, open source, fully featured cross-platform text editors available in
1993.

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bshimmin
Do a view source on that page to get some lovely 90's era HTML nostalgia. (If
you're wondering why the in-page menu behaves like that... it's because
they're images, swapped out for their hover state with JavaScript, with the
off state actually an animated GIF!)

~~~
roemerb
No CSS! Fantastic

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unicornporn
Ha!!! That header image has been there for a while, I can tell you
[https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20000510165803/http://www.p...](https://web-
beta.archive.org/web/20000510165803/http://www.pmail.com/).

If I recall things right this had a built in email list management. I had
acquired a CSV of all the student and staff addresses. While I was goofing
around with this I accidentally sent out a to a really strange email to
everybody (but it kind of looked like it was addressed to them because
everybody was in BCC). Next day at school was terrible.

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arde
Still Windows-only. Too bad the author didn't take the opportunity of
rewriting it into portable code.

~~~
astrodust
Nobody's happy until everything's an Electron app.

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fisheye13
Working at a technical university in germany right now. Our secretary is still
using pegasus.

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timkeller
Pegasus was my introduction to email in the 90's. Glad it's still around.

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gweinberg
I used pegasus, back in the 20th century.

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i_feel_great
I distinctly remember David Harris at Auckland University, and I think this is
the same guy who wrote PegasusMail. Nice, unassuming geeky dude. Surprised
this is still working.

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oliyoung
Wow, Pegasus is still a thing?

~~~
ronilan
Apperantly. But it's outdated. I moved to Eudora. Never looked back.

~~~
guiambros
LOL, indeed. I ran an ISP in the 94-99 era, and we used to distribute Pegasus
for the first couple of years.

But it was buggy and not very friendly, so we migrated to Eudora, and indeed
users never looked back.

~~~
soufron
Yes but Eudora was quite heavy. 486 owners did not really have a choice, but
Pegasus was quite cool on it. I have fond memories of it.

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stuaxo
We had pegasus in college at in about 1996 ... everyone went mad using it
basically as an instant messenger clogging up all the computer rooms.

~~~
blowski
We used it as well. One of the kids in my year searched for "e" in the address
book, and then sent a mass email saying "You have an 'e' in your name". He
repeated that with all the vowels and some other letters, and then the server
crashed.

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dlehman
Wow, that's a blast from the past...

~~~
bstamour
I know, right? That was the email client my dad used back when we first got
dialup in the early 90's.

~~~
Lendal
Pegasus is so old it was around before people started saying, "I know, right?"

The English language has actually changed during Pegasus' lifetime.

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giarc
Is this the same as PGMail? I remember using PGMail back in elementary school
on what was probably Windows 1 or something. It was all blue and you would
Ctrl-Enter to send a message.

~~~
n4r9
> you would Ctrl-Enter to send a message

Don't most email clients have that? That's how I send emails on Gmail and
Outlook.

~~~
giarc
Sorry - that was the only way to send the message if I remember correctly. It
was like 25 years ago.

~~~
n4r9
Hah! It's cool to know that a "trick" I picked up a couple of years ago was
the standard method a couple of decades ago.

