Ouch! Pegasus dead
David Harris announced today that both development and distribution of Pegasus Mail will be discontinued starting immediately.
There are no good e-mail clients, but Pegasus was one of the least worst. Its worst offenses are its quirkyness, and the strange preference of its developer to work on expanding HTML support instead of working on real features. For the past 9 years I have been able to live with that. It’s been awhile since I lamented the death of a computer program.
![[screenshot of the Pegasus homepage]](https://www.tekstadventure.nl/branko/blog/wp-content/pegasushomepage20070103.png)
Pegasus mail has been the only email client I have ever used on my own computers and this was some of the saddest news I have seen. Losing Pegasus Mail would be like losing a dear friend. There have been so many great improvements to it in the past couple of years. In fact the only thing I personally thought that needed to be fixed was the quirky way it wraps text. Beyond this, it does everything I want it to do and it doesn’t do anything I don’t want an email client to do.
The best new feature to it in years has been the new Bayesian filter that was added this past fall. Between content filters, SpamAssasin on my mail server and the new Bayesian filters spam stands zero chance of slipping by and my false positive rate has fallen to a very acceptable level.
Quite simply for my needs, Pegasus Mail is and always has been the best email client available.
I did try to buy the manuals (not that I needed them) from time to time in an effort to support Dave Harris’ efforts, but the payment system he used seemed kind of shaky to me and he didn’t offer a Paypal option (I did email about this). I would have no problem paying an annual subscription fee to support Pegasus, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with risking my credit card on the payment processing system being used it just didn’t appear to be top notch.
I wonder how many other Pegasus users went to buy manuals but were less than comfortable with the available payment options. I mean one of the reasons people like myself use Pegasus is that we are concerned (maybe overly so) about security.
2007 is starting off on such a sad note.
[…] It would appear the rumours of Pegasus’ death have been greatly exagerated. Or rather, it would appear that after many responses to his announcement, Pegasus author David Harris has decided to try and make a U-turn. Let’s hope he succeeds. On January 3rd 2007, I announced that development of Pegasus Mail and Mercury would be ceasing because of funding problems. The result was an absolute avalanche of mail, phone calls, faxes and other communications wanting me to continue. […]
Good news! Developement of Pegasus has resumed!
See http://www.pmail.com