The Internet's longest-serving PC email system, still being updated | Hacker News Reader

The Internet's longest-serving PC email system, still being updated

pmail.com

110 pointsfrancescovaglia22 comments

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Related. Others?

Pegasus Mail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988047 - Aug 2023 (92 comments)

Pegasus Mail Newsflashes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31413891 - May 2022 (3 comments)

Pegasus Mail, 30 Years On - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21975087 - Jan 2020 (46 comments)

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Pegasus Mail: Twenty years and counting... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115730 - Jan 2011 (12 comments)

While not receiving any comments or many votes on HN[1], this 4-page article was worth reading too:

I've never been a businessman - https://www.golem.de/news/interview-with-david-harris-i-ve-n...

[1] For 30 years Pegasus Mail has been the project of a single programmer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25526517 - Dec 2020 (0 comments)

We used to run this on our Novell Netware system and it integrated beautifully.

I still use it occasionally even now when I want to decode attachments from emails that I only have the plain text of.

We also ran Mercury Mail server for a few years as well. The software always felt like it was a labour of love from the author.

The progress updates promised on https://www.pmail.com/devnews.htm can be found at https://community.pmail.com/index.php?u=/category/progress-u....

Looked after a 1000 seat Pegasus and Mercury installation on Netware in the 90s. Surprised to hear it is still going!

So nice that the site still has an "email etiquette" page - so few of those still around these days!

https://www.pmail.com/etqtte.htm

The website was made using FrontPage 3. Ha, that brings back a lot of memories.

Ohhh frontpage. Wonderful product that taught people positioning with no break spaces.

I made good money cleaning all that shit up when people thought they could do a website and painted themselves into a corner. And I wasn't even a web designer. More like a programmer. Though that whole qualification (web designer) was still emerging in those days.

In Holland we used to call frontpage 'strontpage', stront meaning shit. Pretty apt name for the quality of content it produced.

Of course then came Dreamweaver which was what it says on the tin, a dream to work with. With great CSS support. Until adobe took it over and made it subscription crap it was a really nice product. Macromedia was pretty great except for flash.

Adobe, another one of those "buy and squeeze the juice out until it dies" companies.

I can't really see an easy way to allow good companies to flourish, and ones which are malign in this way to not, but companies like Adobe, Broadcom, Oracle need to just be destroyed.

The problem is it doesn't even die because Adobe pretty much have a monopoly in the serious design market.

With broadcom I don't really understand what their business is. I thought they were making SoCs and peripheral chips but now they seem to dabble in everything intent on screwing it up.

And Oracle has been dead a long time. They just get by on some legacy corporate stuff. Everyone hates them due to how they treat their 'customers' (victims is a better word) so everyone who could escape already has.

IBM and Dell should also be long gone by now, according to a laymen's understanding of their businesses. Unfortunately, business doesn't operate according to Internet forum ~/vibes/~, even though the stock market sometimes does. Comcast and Spirit airlines as well, based on customer satisfaction. But here we are. Unless we can coordinate, and designate, say March 20th as "pull your money out of Bank of America day", and get enough people to do something, corporations aren't remotely even going to notice you exist.

Pegasus for mail, Forte Agent for news and mIRC for IRC were my holy trinity of communication apps for many years, well into the early 2000s.

I guess this is for DOS only systems? I used elm on BSD/386 in the 80s, and honestly was a little surprised to learn it's still being maintained by Kari Hurtta. And then I was thinking, Pegasus can't be older than Pine, Alpine or Mutt, can it? But yes, it is. You learn something new every day.

> I guess this is for DOS only systems?

No.

The Pegasus client is a Win32 app and in my minimal testing also works on WINE on Linux.

I haven't tried the Mercury email server but it's Win32 as well.

Amazing, and you can still download the DOS version

https://www.pmail.com/downloads_de_t.htm

At college everyone started using it as an instant messenger in about 1996, overwhelming the network network.

Anyone have links or something else to relate about what would be the oldest x86 SMTP node?

Wild it's New Zealand made

I remember setting it up in 1996 for our small company:) Was a replacement for Compuserve :)

for those who use it, how do you deal with the fact that it stores mail on your hard drive un-encrypted? Do encrypt the entire volume?

I mean… if it’s your hard drive, you presumably have key read/export access to any keystore that you could possibly use. Which is to say, what’s the point?

Oh yeah I remember deploying that in a Novell NetWare environment lol. Had no idea that still existed.

From the title I thought it was about sendmail. But that is not really PC no, at least not in the days when Unixes were huge server boxes

The site doesn't have a single screenshot. This was acceptable 30 years ago, but certainly not today.

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