Email Tool, Par Excellence (Pegasus Mail)

Member Name: wulf

Product:	Pegasus Mail
Date:	23/10/01 (213 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Focussed on email, Very well organised, Free

Disadvantages: Interface might seem a bit 'technical' to some users

I've been using Pegasus Mail for about six years and, although I've gone through other email clients in my professional capacity (as an IT Technician and now as a Webmaster), I've stuck with it for personal use. Let me track my personal history as a Pegasus user.

Initially, I wanted something I was familiar with. Pegasus, a favourite in many educational institutions, was the program available at the college where I worked. Therefore, my first choice was decided by nothing more complicated than simple circumstance. I imagine that's why so many people today use programs like MS Outlook (which is on a high proportion of business desktops) or MS Outlook Express (hard to avoid if your machine comes preloaded with Windows).

After a while, I decided to think again about my choice and I looked around at other packages, such as Eudora. Pegasus didn't stand out as completely unique; on the other hand, nothing else had any features that I felt were missing, and so I decided not to change. After all, I could send and receive, create a folder structure to store old messages, save a message to finish later, etc... and that was aside from all the tricks I have still never got round to playing with (like putting photos in the address book).

As I started to send and receive more emails, my next evaluation was based on what would help me make the best use of a slowish modem on a pay per minute dial up connection. Pegasus made it easy to queue up mails for sending in a quick burst once I'd turned the line on, and never once tried to connect without my permission).

It also let me check the messages waiting on the server before downloading them. Voila - I could instantly wipe out spam and oversize files before wasting valuable seconds of connection time. Even now that I'm using BT's surftime package to give me free offpeak access, I still tend to avoid such things, which has doubtless helped protect me from all manner o
f email-borne viruses and useless junk.

The bottom line is that Pegasus Mail is an extremely capable email program. It can do everything that I need - I've only mentioned a few of the features I use most often and skimmed right over others that I also find important; multiple email accounts and user accounts (fun for all the family!), distribution lists (for contacting groups of people), and more. I've not even begun to think about email related tools that I don't currently use at all (IMAP support, LDAP client, etc). There's more than enough to do most things you'd want to do with email.

I think that's really the heart of why I haven't ended up turning to anything else - Pegasus works really well for email and doesn't confuse matters by trying to include newsgroups, web browsing, diary, to-do list, and the like. Consequently, it is very good at its job and doesn't open up all the security holes found in a more 'multi-talented' package, such as MS Outlook. If you've got other programs to surf the web and sort out your appointments, and want something that just does email very, very well, I'd recommend looking at Pegasus.

Oh, and did I mention that it's free... ;-)

Summary: