Pegasus Mail | Hacker News Reader

Pegasus Mail

pmail.com

114 pointsbane49 comments

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...

A friend of mine swears by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System

Uh ... Thanks for sharing the link as I didn't know that! Fortunately, they say they aim to be as close to the current TB as possible. So that gives me some hope. I worry that some highly individual use-cases will probably not work anymore in the future, though.

For example, if they move the content of the RSS feeds into a database (They'll keep RSS feeds .. right?) my two-line bash script for automatically downloading videos from links contained in one feed wouldn't work anymore ;)

There's a developer news update for April 2017:

http://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm

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

best read, new product written while maintaining ability to read old message formats.

Unrelated but their website is remarkably well rendered in w3m.

http://imgur.com/a/QOdMd

If I had just seen that, I would have just assumed that was the site!

Check out the email etiquette page http://www.pmail.com/etqtte.htm

"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?

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

I had no idea. So cool.

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.

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

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.

I had no idea it still exists. I stopped using it like more than 15 years ago after too many corporate server obstacles. I believed that it had been discontinued... or maybe it was Eudora?

>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.

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.

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!)

No CSS! Fantastic

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I used pegasus, back in the 20th century.

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.

Wow, Pegasus is still a thing?

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

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.

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.

Juno offers a free address too!

What about it is outdated?

The joke is that Eudora is also 'ancient'.

No joke. It is ancient. Not quite as old as I am, but not that far off.

Yeah, I remember my university using it with Novell Netware 3 in 1995...

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.

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.

this!!

I remember how much I disliked using it in Uni!!

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

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

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

The English language has actually changed during Pegasus' lifetime.

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.

We used to have it as PMail .. back in the mid 90s at uni .. used it for a bit, then shifted to Mutt, and finally to Thunderbird and stuck to it till now :(

> 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.

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

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.

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