
Pegasus Mail, 30 Years On - rhabarba
http://www.pmail.com/30years.htm
======
porker
I like his comments on
[http://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm](http://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm):

"I'll resist the urge to let loose, though, and simply say that (1) "Less-
secure applications" is crude scare-mongering by Google that means little and
is mainly intended to serve their political agenda, and that (2) OAUTH2 is
among the most poorly-standardized and ill-considered hacks I've ever
encountered in thirty years of serving the Internet."

I would like to read his full rant about OAUTH2 for email authentication!

~~~
brazzledazzle
It looks like their OAuth2 is compliant with OIDC which is way easier to deal
with than vanilla Oauth2. OIDC makes things consistent and clear. In practice
OAuth2 without the OpenID bits is loosely glued together vendor specific bits.

~~~
porker
That is really good to hear. I hate working with OAuth2 (though working with
SAML at present, I'm beginning to wish for OAuth2...)

~~~
brazzledazzle
OIDC is so much easier to deal with than SAML in almost every way. There’s
certain scenarios where I like SAML better but they’re really rare.

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dragonsh
My company in 1996-99 used Pegasus mail extensively to manage emails besides
mutt, Eudora mail.

Also provided mercury mail as a standalone small mail relay and newsletters
servers to some companies as it supported mailing list management by a file
which was generated from a web app.

Just in the subsequent jobs moved away from Pegasus as mutt and Thunderbird
being open source were preferred by the team.

Later with Fortune 500 moved to lotus notes and outlook with exchange and both
were a horrible experience.

Pmail is one of the best email client on windows, much better than outlook and
lotus notes.

Congratulations to the author to be able to keep this client and server alive
and constantly updating it.

~~~
rhabarba
Admittedly, the developer has slowed down a bit - Pegasus Mail 5 has been
announced since 2006 - and I wonder how the next incarnation will look and
feel. But it is calming to know that the world where web browsers are not the
best option to read and write e-mail messages is not going to go away soon.

~~~
dragonsh
Even though developer slowed down, he did not abandon the project and continue
to develop it in spite of not making it open source.

This requires tenacity and persistence, which is at display in this project.

I moved away from this programs since MS Windows is not important for my
company or my customers. My teams and I on personal level didn't touch any MS
windows OS or machine for over 6 years now. No one in my team even wants to
touch anything with Microsoft OS, they prefer either FreeBSD, Linux or Mac OSX
(mostly used as unix with a good peripheral device support). In a rare case if
some customer wants some support on windows the first thing to do is to
install WSL with Ubuntu and then it becomes useable.

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gingerlime
Oh, pmail <3

My personal anecdote: In 1994, I was a junior PC/Novell sysadmin in the
Israeli Airforce headquarters in Tel-Aviv (as part of my mandatory military
service). Generally speaking, security was kind of a big deal, but somehow
there was a copy of pmail running around, and it became the de-facto standard
internal email communication tool across the entire airforce headquarters (and
probably beyond?). I remember later even plugging it via SMTP into one of the
mainframe systems, so we could send and receive messages from pmail to the
mainframe.

I doubt the author got paid for all those copies, but he definitely deserved
to be paid generously for it. pmail was simple and just worked. I don't
remember the specifics, but I remember the joy of using it even now.

~~~
rhabarba
That's what had already (almost) killed Pegasus Mail a while ago: It is a
freeware tool and donations for non-OSS are not really a thing anymore.

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tomc1985
Wow, here's a name I didn't expect to ever see again (and neither did I
realize that they have such a long history)

I never used Pegasus much but many moons ago worked at a place that used
Mercury MTS as a mail server. It worked wonderfully, and of all the software
that particular server ran, Mercury was the least fussy and fairly easy (for
sysadmin me, anyway) to set up. (Though IIRC leave the server window open, I
think it was easy to accidentally kill it by closing the window. Surely that's
fixed now)

Nice to see that they're still being updated, and that the author is still
around, cares about, and is supported by his work. Seeing stuff like this
gives me hope for the future as jobs become seemingly more and more
bureaucratic and proprietary cloud stacks swallow up many of the things that I
enjoyed

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cheez
I have a product that has lasted for a little over a decade. I use it daily.
Others use it daily. But I have had to keep up with the times.

A website from 12 years ago does NOT look the same as today's websites. There
are navigation conventions/expectations for downloadable products. For
example, screenshots? It would be good to update the website to follow modern
conventions. For example, compare Microsoft from a decade ago to today:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080101150414/http://www.micros...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080101150414/http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/default.mspx)
[https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
ca/windows/)

Unless it is purely a volunteer effort that is.

~~~
MrGilbert
I find it kind of amusing that, although it's an old website, it's not really
lightweight. That is, a request transmits 45 kb on the first visit. This could
be drastically reduced by using some css instead of gifs for the hover effect
in the menu (ieks!).

~~~
rytis
On the other hand, view source, and it's all there, and actually is rather
readable for uninitiated...

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zimba4567
I still use it today on my main Win 10 machine. I used it first when netscape
communicator announced end of live. Anyway - must be over 20 years now. Why
not? Never change a running system - I guess...

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pantulis
One has to tip his hat to a developer that keeps his project alive for three
decades.

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soufron
Wow. I used it on Win 3.1 on an old 486sx25. It was both powerful and
lightweight. I loved it.

~~~
rhabarba
It still is!

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EdgarVerona
Until I switched to google for my email, Pegasus Mail was my go-to client.
Amazing to see it still kicking after all these years, and still updating!
Kudos to him for keeping up with it!

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annoyingnoob
I setup Pegasus Mail at a company in 1994, had no idea it was still around.
Amazing dedication to keep it going all this time. NetWare came and went
pretty quickly.

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mleo
This certainly brings back some nostalgia. The university group I worked with
back in my college days in the mid 90's used Pegasus mail. Reminds me of
simpler days of school work and a summer spent upgrading Netware from 3.x to
4.x and moving from Charon to Mercury Mail. Not seen those since I graduated,
but glad to see the developer still has active development and support for
those programs.

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duelingjello
Pegasus Mail is still alive? I worked for a small nuclear energy consultancy
that used it circa 1998 on Windows 3.1 and 95 on a Novell Network.

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51Cards
I had a couple of my larger clients in the 90's running Pegasus into the
early/mid 2000's, especially since it worked so well with Netware. Seldom gave
me any problems even if the UI grew to be a little dated. I'd learned all
kinds of management tricks around the databases, most of which I have
forgotten now but I'm so glad this project still exists.

~~~
busterarm
It was fun times in high school when we learned how to use Pegasus mail to
send scary red alerts to the less computer-savvy people over Netware.

Anonymously.

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squiggleblaz
Thirty years of history should mean lots of screenshots over the years, but
the author hasn't supplied any. Anyone can help?

~~~
rhabarba
Pegasus Mail 3.12c:
[http://screenshots.modemhelp.net/screenshots/Pegasus/Mail_v3...](http://screenshots.modemhelp.net/screenshots/Pegasus/Mail_v3.12c/Client/Index.jpg)

Pegasus Mail 4.12:
[http://www.dwx.com/support/faqs/pegasus412/create/new00.png](http://www.dwx.com/support/faqs/pegasus412/create/new00.png)

Those are the only two ones I could find without spending more time than
reasonable.

~~~
ken
I didn't know anyone who actually used it on Windows back then. I remember it
more like
[https://twitter.com/soothron/status/1163555232636383233](https://twitter.com/soothron/status/1163555232636383233)

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soapdog
Anyone still running it? I'd love to see the current screenshots.
Unfortunately I couldn't find them on the page.

~~~
rhabarba
I tried running it a few years ago (it was a recent-ish 4.x version), but it
crashed - so I chose The Bat! instead. The crash bug seems to be fixed by the
way, but I'm happy with my current choice (which is Pandora Mail).

I'll probably try Pegasus Mail 5 anyway. :-)

It has not changed much over the course of the past few years:
[https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/Pegasus-
Mail_1...](https://windows-cdn.softpedia.com/screenshots/Pegasus-Mail_1.png)

~~~
jjeaff
From a UI perspective, I see no need to change anything from that screenshot.
Glad he doesn't feel the need to fiddle with it.

~~~
rhabarba
MDI is a big bonus!

~~~
soapdog
wow it has been ages since I last saw MDI based apps.

~~~
rhabarba
One of the reasons why I use Pandora Mail, honestly.

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edoceo
Oh, my first email program! On DOS (in a Win95 sub-system) connected to some
Groupwise shit. Memories.

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ab_testing
Is Mercury Mail a reliable SMTP server for your personal domain with a few
emails defined.

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greypowerOz
oh wow.. I was a pmail user back when i was a Windows user :)

i wonder if there's a linux port!!!

~~~
rhabarba
There is not, but Pegasus is said to run on Wine:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=34008#testdata)

------
shortlived
Anyone using this on Windows 10 in a corp environment?

