Last week I set up with Pegasus Mail 4.63, having a rather dreadful time over it because (a) it proved impossible for PM to display the necessary sender and recipient information, and often the date too, in the listings of copies of sent mail imported from other mail programs, and (b) there was no search facility in PM's help system, and nearly all keywords that I wanted to look up were not in the help index.
Despite those problems I persisted and got PM set up because I really liked it in many ways, including its exemplary neat and compact, clear and focused user interface, which is a great example for other mail program developers to take note of - though, sadly, UI clarity and focus do not appear to be in the forefront of most software developers' agendas these days. However, once it finally came home to me that there really was no way I could get any imported 'sent' messages to be displayed in a usable manner in the message list, I was greatly disappointed and finally had to abandon PM and transfer to Thunderbird, which I found to do all I want, and quite well - at least with the relevant add-ons installed. However, Thunderbird still has a poor UI compared with PM, and so I'm very interested to see how PM 5 eventually turns out. If it has addressed the main issues I had with it, I would be very glad to come back to PM despite all Thunderbird's many good points.
For this reason I want to highlight here the problems I found in PM, which point to new features / functionality that are needed in v5. Most likely (I hope!) they are already addressed or in the pipeline to be addressed in the new version.
1. Columns in message lists - the real disaster area for me at the moment, being truly hopeless for imported 'sent' mail (the recipients not being shown at all in the listing). There needs to be a full range of user selectable column options, including both 'from' and 'to' columns, and at least the option to have both name and e-mail address displayed in each of those columns. Also, the order of the columns needs to be user definable. Inadequate implementation of columns and the resultant inability to show the recipient of imported 'sent' mail is the #1 issue that forced me to abandon PM.
2. Help system needs a search facility and much more comprehensive index (though the latter would not be much of an issue if there were a search facility). Incidentally, I usually find online help systems for programs to be more or less useless - and the Thunderbird one proved particularly useless to me, so that, just as with Pegasus, when I wanted to look up 'help', all I could usefully do was to use search engine queries to find out how other people had managed to do what I wanted to do. I mention this latter point simply because I would like to encourage the continuation of an 'on-board' help system for PM; it's just that it needs to be more helpfully implemented.
3. Spelling checker needs replacing with one that underlines all misspelled words at least in message body - as in Eudora 7, The Bat! and Thunderbird, and gives a right-click menu set of spell-check options for the misspelled word at the cursor. Somebody posted in the Support forum that this is already in the pipeline for v.5. If it is, that is great.
Although I'm not now using PM, I'm keeping it installed on my system, so that Software Informer should eventually inform me when new versions of PM come out. I look forward to that time, and trying out the no doubt long awaited and presumably much improved v.5. I hope that it will be taken as an encouragement that I really want to come back to PM once the columns issue (in particular) has been fixed.
Last week I set up with Pegasus Mail 4.63, having a rather dreadful time over it because (a) it proved impossible for PM to display the necessary sender and recipient information, and often the date too, in the listings of copies of sent mail imported from other mail programs, and (b) there was no search facility in PM's help system, and nearly all keywords that I wanted to look up were not in the help index.
Despite those problems I persisted and got PM set up because I really liked it in many ways, including its exemplary neat and compact, clear and focused user interface, which is a great example for other mail program developers to take note of - though, sadly, UI clarity and focus do not appear to be in the forefront of most software developers' agendas these days. However, once it finally came home to me that there really was no way I could get any imported 'sent' messages to be displayed in a usable manner in the message list, I was greatly disappointed and finally had to abandon PM and transfer to Thunderbird, which I found to do all I want, and quite well - at least with the relevant add-ons installed. However, Thunderbird still has a poor UI compared with PM, and so I'm very interested to see how PM 5 eventually turns out. If it has addressed the main issues I had with it, I would be very glad to come back to PM despite all Thunderbird's many good points.
For this reason I want to highlight here the problems I found in PM, which point to new features / functionality that are needed in v5. Most likely (I hope!) they are already addressed or in the pipeline to be addressed in the new version.
1. Columns in message lists - the real disaster area for me at the moment, being truly hopeless for imported 'sent' mail (the recipients not being shown at all in the listing). There needs to be a full range of user selectable column options, including both 'from' and 'to' columns, and at least the option to have both name and e-mail address displayed in each of those columns. Also, the order of the columns needs to be user definable. Inadequate implementation of columns and the resultant inability to show the recipient of imported 'sent' mail is the #1 issue that forced me to abandon PM.
2. Help system needs a search facility and much more comprehensive index (though the latter would not be much of an issue if there were a search facility). Incidentally, I usually find online help systems for programs to be more or less useless - and the Thunderbird one proved particularly useless to me, so that, just as with Pegasus, when I wanted to look up 'help', all I could usefully do was to use search engine queries to find out how other people had managed to do what I wanted to do.  I mention this latter point simply because I would like to encourage the continuation of an 'on-board' help system for PM; it's just that it needs to be more helpfully implemented.
3. Spelling checker needs replacing with one that underlines all misspelled words at least in message body - as in Eudora 7, The Bat! and Thunderbird, and gives a right-click menu set of spell-check options for the misspelled word at the cursor. Somebody posted in the Support forum that this is already in the pipeline for v.5. If it is, that is great.
Although I'm not now using PM, I'm keeping it installed on my system, so that Software Informer should eventually inform me when new versions of PM come out. I look forward to that time, and trying out the no doubt long awaited and presumably much improved v.5. I hope that it will be taken as an encouragement that I really want to come back to PM once the columns issue (in particular) has been fixed.
