Pegasus Mail & Mercury

I have noticed several quirks with apps on Vista that also effect Pegasus Mail.   I thought a thread to discuss what I and others have found would be handy.

Probably the biggest Feature (Annoyance) with Vista has to do with running software from other than local drives.  Vista trusts programs on removable drives/media  and network servers less.   Because of that you have to run Pegasus Mail as Administrator if its on a thumb drive in -roam mode.    It will run without Administrator but often will have messages that have no text in the reader pane (you can see the whole message under Raw View).   In Run as Administrator mode it works normal.   This happens with v4.41 but I suspect all versions are effected.

 
Are there any other Vista quirks people have found so far?
 

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Larry Havenstein
System Engineer
Dept of Communications
Kansas State University

Pegasus Mail and Mercury/32 Beta Team Member.

The problem I have is that I cannot get Pegasus to work over a Novell network in Windows Vista.  All I get is blue screens everytime it loads.  I'm beginning to think it just won't work at all or that it's a limitation of the Novell technology preview that I am using.

 

Any further help would be very much appreciated

Which Novell Client are you using?  There is some discussion as to which is OK for Vista.

Under Vista at times Pegasus will stop functioning normally (ie. mail will no longer send/receive) and take up close to 100% CPU, although you can continue reading messages and compose them and add to the queue.  When you quit the application, the pmail process remains and takes up 100% CPU.  Once you end the process in Task Manager, you can re-launch Pegasus and continue as per usual.  Very annoying as this 'bug' has caused my machine to overheat a few times now by keeping the CPU pegged at 100% for so long when it really isn't doing anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is because of the beta client.  I can run it from a Windows 2003 server and get the same effect I do with the -roam version off a thumb drive.

Microsoft didn't give Novell the same quality connections to hook into in Vista that existed in XP so I expect that road to a good client to be a bumpy one. 

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Larry Havenstein
System Engineer
Dept of Communications
Kansas State University

Pegasus Mail and Mercury/32 Beta Team Member.

"amrikr wrote the following post at 05-15-2007 22:25: Under Vista at times Pegasus will stop functioning normally (ie. mail will no longer send/receive) and take up close to 100% CPU, although you can continue reading messages and compose them and add to the queue.  When you quit the application, the pmail process remains and takes up 100% CPU.  Once you end the process in Task Manager, you can re-launch Pegasus and continue as per usual.  Very annoying as this 'bug' has caused my machine to overheat a few times now by keeping the CPU pegged at 100% for so long when it really isn't doing anything."

 

Are you using Pegasus Mail 4.41?   Did you try setting it in the properties of the shortcut icon to Windows XP SP2 compatibility code?

When using 4.41 on earlier builds I had to do that or would see some of what you are describing.  Since I have been using the shipping version of Vista,  I have been working on the current VC Beta code David has supplied the beta team (is rough in other places but stable, far from releasable) that is compiled with Visual C instead of Borland C that 4.41 is built on.   The VC version is faster and doesn't show the CPU Usage problems.  

Give XP Compatibility mode a try and let us know what you see?   Sadly Vista is a learning experiance for everyone involved.
 

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Larry Havenstein
System Engineer
Dept of Communications
Kansas State University

Pegasus Mail and Mercury/32 Beta Team Member.

Thanks for the quick responses!  This is with Pegasus 4.41, but I had not turned Compatibility mode on.  I'll do that now and report back if I still have the issue occur.  So far, so good.  Thanks!

Has any an idea as to when Pegasus Mail will be ready for the amazing Windows Vista?

 

(Perchance this note is not seen by anyone, please advise me immediately ... thanks) 

RIPSNORT:

Has any an idea as to when Pegasus Mail will be ready for the amazing Windows Vista?

 

(Perchance this note is not seen by anyone, please advise me immediately ... thanks) 

 

Depends on what you define as ready.  Many of us use it now once we tweak the program properties.   Is why I said Annoyances and in fact most of the annoyances are things that may never be fixed as MS considers the behavior a "Feature".    The only real problem I know of is the help feature and David Harris is working on that but has to rewrite his help system.   Dates are not something anyone will give at this time.  Especially since Pegasus Mail does Function but without help. 

In the FAQ is the steps to reinstall a working Windows Help so the help feature does work.  So it can be fixed by a user, but is not a automatic install.   This same help problem effects tons of programs and is not unique to Pegasus Mail. 

 

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Larry Havenstein
System Engineer
Dept of Communications
Kansas State University

Pegasus Mail and Mercury/32 Beta Team Member.

Thank you for the reply. By the *ready* I mean "does it work with Vista" and lo & behold ... you have answered the question.

The *help* within Pegasus is less than minor for myself ... if the program itself works with Vista, this is a plus.

Thank you again for your reply.  

Hi again, I've tried with Compatibility mode turned on, and frankly it's made things much worse.  Now it still pegs the CPU at 100%, BUT, in Task Manager it no longer shows the Pegasus process and causes the machine to become unoperable.  I'm reverting back to regular mode as I've had to hit the physical power switch on the machine several times now because of this issue.

One thing that I forgot to mention before but remembered now is that I also get an error in Pegasus that says "Unable to initialize printer" when I'm just viewing a message; this occurs sometimes just before it goes into the whole 100% CPU usage mode, but not every time.  It's an error that comes up where I can press the OK button, but even though I press it, another identical box just pops right up behind it so it's never ending.  I end up having to close my mailboxes in Pegasus, then quitting.  It usually pops up with a message that says the product quit unexpectedly.
 

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks again! 

I thought there was to be an update for Vista ... are we really to be kept waiting for when ever to see that ... does it really take that long to write something for Pegasus that will be workable with Vista ... this is an honest question by the way.

RIPSNORT:

I thought there was to be an update for Vista ... are we really to be kept waiting for when ever to see that ... does it really take that long to write something for Pegasus that will be workable with Vista ... this is an honest question by the way.

Yes, it does. This isn't just a five minute patch - I'm having to rewrite the entire Pegasus Mail help system and port all the existing data from the old WinHelp format to it. I cannot use HTMLHelp, because it is terminally broken in a significant number of commonly-used Pegasus Mail installations (i.e, any situation where Pegasus Mail is run from a shared device, such as a file server). It amazes me that  Microsoft could have made the decisions they have, effectively resulting in Vista shipping without a usable help system. It's an extra development burden I did not need and did not want.

Things are complicated by other major modifications I'm making to the program preparatory to working on version 5; I've essentially had to rewrite something like half the program, and while I do that, I cannot release patches or betas.

Given that the help issue is the only major issue I'm aware of with Pegasus Mail under Vista, and that it can be fixed by downloading WinHelp from the Microsoft support site, it really didn't seem like an overriding concern and it has therefore not made its voice loudly heard amid the clamoring hordes of other issues I am trying to handle.

-- David --

Hi David,

Thanks for your post.  My issue with Pegasus, while annoying, does not prevent me from using the application.  In fact, if I didn't have Pegasus running 24x7, I likely wouldn't even notice the 100% CPU usage issue.  The Help issue is not really something that affects me greatly either, so I for one very much appreciate that you're focusing on Pegasus 5 than fixing the current version which largely works just fine.

Thanks again for such a wonderful mail app! 

amrikr:

My issue with Pegasus, while annoying, does not prevent me from using the application.  In fact, if I didn't have Pegasus running 24x7, I likely wouldn't even notice the 100% CPU usage issue.

For what it's worth, it's basically impossible for Pegasus Mail to consume 100% of the CPU - it simply never does that much. I'd be looking at the TCP/IP layer on your machine: do you have anything installed at that level? A POP-based antivirus scanner? A VPN driver? If there's something interfering with the TCP/IP stack, then that could make it *appear* that Pegasus Mail was using 100% of the CPU. Past experience with this type of thing has taught me that the network layer is almost always where the real problem lies.

Cheers!

-- David --