We take mail filtering for granted today, but it was big news back in 1991. Pegasus was the first to do it and, 12 years later, its long history ensures lots of development time and a strong community of helpful users. The latest release is a major upgrade, and filtering is still at the forefront.
A good example is the Content Control spam trap, which weights common junk words and phrases, but also uses the traditional black and white lists. Known spammers can be added to the blacklist, trusted senders to the whitelist, and if you hang a high negative weighting on a trusted email address or mailing list name it will always pass through the filtering intact.
The theory sounds good, but the whole thing is complex and unwieldy in practice. It doesn’t trap enough spam and creates false positives in the process. You may get better results if you’re prepared spend time tinkering. Pegasus Mail’s faults are exposed when you look at Outlook using SpamNet -- comparatively, SpamNet needs hardly any configuration, but still traps around 95 percent of the spam thrown at it.
However, there’s more to this mail client than spam blocking, and Pegasus is certainly fully featured. It will happily run across a LAN as well as a desktop machine, and there’s built-in support for Novell NetWare too. What’s more, you can download the freeware Mercury Mail server application if you want the closest integration.
Among Pegasus’ new features is proper SSL support for IMAP4, POP3 and SMTP using 192-bit encryption keys (via Peter Gutmann’s cryptlib encryption library) as standard. The POP3/SMTP code routines have been totally re-written to allow multiple active POP3 mailboxes, and they apply filtering rules on the server too. External HTML rendering within messages is blocked, and a group viewing feature allows an active thread view, which sorts messages into threads and moves threads with new messages to the top of the tree. Template editing has also been made easier, as you no longer need to understand the template scripting language.
There are plenty of good things to say about Pegasus -- easy mail merging, a decent distribution list for managing large mailing lists, POP3 selective download previewing, an Australian English spell check, even a telephone message form. All this is great, but there are unfortunately far too many downers to add to the list. Pegasus may have pioneered filtering, but the standard filter-editing interface hasn’t kept pace with the times. Even worse, if you’re migrating from any other client, you can forget an easy ride. There’s no easy import function to move your existing messages over, and the chances of keeping your folder structures intact is also pretty remote. There’s no doubt that Pegasus is great value, but whether it’s worth the hassle is another matter entirely.