Pegasus Mail: Twenty years and counting... | Hacker News Reader

Pegasus Mail: Twenty years and counting...

community.pmail.com

37 pointsAnon8412 comments

Working on the same piece of software for 20 years is mind-boggling. I can't decide whether I admire the guy or feel sorry for him.

We actually use Pegasus mail at work for our departmental email (very large university, London). Despite the fact that for the majority of users it works just fine and there is no need for something more complicated - apart from the archaic client - they are now in the process of overhauling everything due to a big $$$ contract with Microsoft.

You know when someone says "remember when... candy only cost a nickel?, or pegasus mail was an awesome alternative to eudora?"

I do! Congratulations Pegasus for lasting 20 years. I can't say I use you anymore. Gmail kinda took the cake. But I still love you, and when people bring you up, I have fond memories of you.

I seem to recall at one point it was the one-click-install (more or less) Windows program that actually let / made it easy to pull headers without pulling entire messages. A relative was on a slow modem, and I trained them in this feature so that they could delete the majority of their nascent spam deluge from the sever without incurring the hit of downloading the entire messages.

(Spam filtering options started becoming commonplace / an option for them not too long thereafter.)

Has it aged well? I don't remember when or why I moved away from it, but there must have been a reason.

Pegasus did age well (if albeit very slowly). Most features you wanted to see in a modern mail client arrived eventually. There was a period of time where development had stopped IIRC because the developer didn't see the purpose in it anymore. Again IIRC he started again after seeing that the community wanted it to be kept alive.

I haven't seen a version in about 2 years now as my last client finally moved off of it due to the desire for 'cloud' style email and Blackberry support but Pegasus never let them down while they were on it.

I stopped using it around a decade ago because it was too slow when my mailbox got really huge, and it didn't have indexed search.

I'm curious how it's improved, but gmail is good enough that I have a hard time imagining wanting to go back to a desktop client.

No easy way to migrate out for one of my Professors who has 16 no 17 years of meticulously foldered emails. if he hand't foldered them it would be a point and click...

I ended up installing a virtual box XP install just for Pegasus on his new 27" iMac!

Doesn't PMail have export functions? I might have lost some part of the information doing it, though (could be because I had to pipe through Outlook Express, and Outlook Express was to blame - I can't remember).

Or if PMail does IMAP, copy all folders to an IMAP account?

In less than a month it's Pegasus 21th birthday! The article is almost a year old. My first email client was indeed Pegasus. I started using it around 1995, the year of awakening.

I remember trying them once 5 years ago and not caring for the software that much ... With free alternatives like Postbox lite, I don't know how long their run will continue.

The linked story was celebrating its 20th birthday 11 months ago. Why the post today?

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