RIP Pegasus Mail :: Email client recommendations?

[pne]

Probably my first contact with email software was with Pegasus Mail back in 1992; I imagine our company had chosen it because it integrated well with the Novell network we used back then.

Since I was already familiar with that program, and since it was free, I installed it at home as well; I think I used "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" (the precursor of Outlook Express) for only a couple of months before I migrated to Pegasus at home, probably in late 1992 or early 1993. I've been using Pegasus Mail as my mail client ever since, for about fourteen years.

Every now and then I've toyed with moving to another program (especially since Pegasus Mail didn't support UTF-8 for a long time), but the amount of mail I had saved in Pegasus format, and the fact that I was used to it, always put me off.

Now Heise Online has reported (in German) that Pegasus Mail will no longer be developed. Apparently, David Harris had considered releasing Pegasus Mail completely for free (including the manual, which one used to have to pay for, as one way of donating), while Mercury, a mail server, would become a "semi-commercial" product, but it seems that plans have changed: the front page says that Pegasus Mail and Mercury will both no longer be developed.

Pegasus Mail can still be downloaded for now, but the download page is no longer linked to from the front page.

A pity.

I believe that David Harris had originally made the program available free of charge because he had the philosophy that basic Internet software should be free, and that people should cooperate with one another—the kind of spirit that was, I suppose, more prevalent during the early days of the Internet, before it became ubiquitous. (Another example of that kind of spirit is in SMTP: little concern for things such as authentication, as mail sites tended simply to trust one another.)

Sic transit gloria mundi. (That's Latin for "Gloria threw up in the bus on Monday.")

Perhaps I shall have to consider a bit more seriously moving to another email program. I do use Webmail a whole lot more than I used to (especially Gmail and Fastmail.FM), but I still read messages at home, and having a program that's still being maintained may be useful—even though Pegasus Mail still works for me.

Does anyone have any recommendations for an email client for a Windows machine?

Comments

[bride.livejournal.com]

Just to throw out one that others haven't mentioned yet, I used to use PMMail (http://www.pmmail2000.com/) on my Windows machine at home. It's payware with a free 45-day trial, so that's kind a crappy. I wanted to have the 3-pane view with the Preview Pane, but I didn't want Outlook to automatically run or open anything just because it knew how to. PMMail can preview the textual content of the message and leave the attachments for you to open.

I now use web mail almost exclusively, but I have one GMail account that I use with Thunderbird. I NEVER see spam or any unwanted e-mail. EVER. EVER. EVER. EVER. It doesn't download the messages that are put in the Spam folder. Conceivably, there might be messages in the Spam folder that you wanted and would miss, but I do check and I haven't run across that yet.

I look for a good filtering feature with any e-mail client, because I filter my messages up the wall and down the other side. Thunderbird is pretty good with that. The ability to have multiple conditions, set criteria for any possible bit of an e-mail message and for it to ACTUALLY FILTER THINGS CORRECTLY is hugely important to me. I'm constantly on the verge of dropkicking Outlook off the roof for the kind of BS that it gets away with as a commercial application but I'm required to use it at work =P

I look for foreign character support in the message content. Thunderbird doesn't do this well. It acts like a browser that's not very good at it. But there are manual workarounds and the lack of Spam is big enough of a plus to keep me. I do have faith that it will get better. =)

Thunderbird

[pne.livejournal.com]

I look for foreign character support in the message content. Thunderbird doesn't do this well. It acts like a browser that's not very good at it.

Oh! That surprises me, and I would have expected more.

Can you tell me more about the shortcomings you've seen and the workarounds you've found?

Re: Thunderbird

[bride.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I expected it to behave similar to Firefox or the SeaMonkey browser.

My family in China writes to me in Simplified Chinese, but I get garbled text. It won't show the Simplified characters even when I set it to "Auto-detect all Chinese encodings". I have to explicitly go and change the encoding to GB myself. =P

I would have expected it to be able to at least display the Simplified characters properly. What would be even better is if it automatically translated the Simplified to Traditional for me, but that would take Developers who cared enough to do it. =)

Re: Thunderbird

[pne.livejournal.com]

What would be even better is if it automatically translated the Simplified to Traditional for me, but that would take Developers who cared enough to do it. =)

And an algorithm that was sophisticated enough to Do The Right Thing :) Since Simplified characters can map to more than one Traditional character (in the opposite direction, this is apparently also true sometimes, but much more rarely), so a simplistic algorithm that always maps 1:1 will mean, for example, that either "departure" or "hair" will look weird in Traditional.

NJStar Communicator does this, though. It can display text in Chinese even without Chinese support, and you can select autodetect, GB, and Big5, as well as Traditional/Simplified. So you can view GB text with Traditional characters or Big5 in Simplified! And from the few times I've tried that, it does a decent job. (The program is payware, though.)

Re: Thunderbird

[bride.livejournal.com]

It's not 1:1, you're right. But I think it's close enough, at least for something as informal as e-mail. Besides, I find that my husband's family in Taiwan, who actually communicate in Traditional Chinese, get more characters wrong on their own than the software XD LOL

Re: NJStar does it.

Yes, this is how I read just about everything =) OpenOffice 2.0+ has this feature in Writer(? whatever the word processing tool is called)... I haven't investigated the accuracy of the conversion in OOo though.