On September 6th, Thomas Stephenson passed away in his sleep. Many of you will have encountered Thomas over the years - for over 15 years now, he has been a major driving force behind Pegasus Mail and Mercury, particularly in supporting those people who use them. Thomas was capable of handling support loads that to this day I can barely understand: having burned myself out on support years ago, it was always a source of ceaseless amazement to me that he could continue offering his help day after day without apparently ever tiring of doing so. In this role, he will be missed.

Thomas was a vocal supporter and driver of the programs. When I had my "meltdown" in 2007, Thomas was one of the key steadying voices who helped me through the bad times, and his input into the shape and form of the programs for over 15 years simply cannot be measured. In this role, he will be missed.

A few years ago, Thomas, and his wife, Donna, visited me in Dunedin, where I live. I had the privilege of spending most of a day with them, showing them around Dunedin and having lunch with them at a little restaurant by the beach. It is surprising how few of my long-term beta testers and supporters I have ever actually met in person - a fact that makes me quite sad any time I think about it, but at least I was fortunate enough to meet Thomas. In the fifteen years that I knew him, I came to regard Thomas as a real friend, and while that would have been true even if I had never had the opportunity to spend some time with him, the memories will be that much stronger and better for having done so. And it is in this role, as a friend, that he will be most missed of all.

Rest easy, and rest well, Thomas.

-- David --

From Facebook, Mary Stephenson Su, 9/5/12:

To the friends of Thomas R Stephenson: Tom (my dad) 
passed away last night from end stage lung cancer. He died 
peacefully in his sleep at home 2 months after his cancer 
diagnosis. He was joking up until the end.

September 5th 2011: Pegasus Mail v4.62 now available for public distribution

Version 4.62 mainly concentrates on fixing late-breaking

incompatibilities in HTML rendering caused by the release version of

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 browser. V4.62 users should experience

reliable, high-quality HTML display using this version, with the quality

of rendering being even higher than in previous versions.

• Updated editor  V4.62 also uses a heavily-updated version of

  the editor module we use, and has numerous changes in the way editing

  buffers are constructed, meaning it should now be able to edit and reply

  to much more complex HTML message formats than previous versions, and

  editing should be much more reliable.

• Open link in background   You can now Ctrl+Click on any link

  in a message to open that link in your web browser without bringing the

  browser to the foreground. This allows you to open a succession of links

  then work with them when you're ready.

• Signatures overhauled   The way signatures are handled has

  been totally overhauled, and you should now find they work considerably

  better when you insert them at compose-time.

• Faster POP3 downloads   POP3 downloads should be significantly faster when you have chosen to leave mail on the POP3 server.

Finally, quite a few small bugs, some of them quite long-standing, have now been fixed.

We expect this to be the last release in the V4 family of Pegasus

Mail, with the next release being the first iteration of the V5 family, which we plan to release in a staggered pattern to ensure more regular updates.

I apologize to everyone for the length of time it has taken to get v4.62 out the door - many of the changes it required were quite subtle, and testing has taken a lot longer than we initially expected. I am trying hard to adjust the way development is conducted to allow more regular releases to be made, and hope you will bear with me in the meantime.

Cheers!

-- David --

Mercury/32 v4.73 has now been released. This new version contains significant new capabilities and a number of important fixes, especially for the MercuryI IMAP server.

V4.73 is the final iteration in the series of incremental upgrades to

Mercury v4.7 that has come out since its release, and will be the last

release in the v4.x family, with development proceeding to Mercury/32 v5

from this point on. We hope to release V5 sometime in 2011.

The following changes are present in v4.73:

• Selective SSL options  The MercuryS SMTP

  server now has options that allow you to enable SSL support on the

  primary and alternate SMTP ports selectively (so, you can have SSL

  enabled on the secondary, but not on the primary, ideal for submission

  by your remote users). There are also new Access Control permission

  settings in the MercuryS ACL editor that allow you to enable or disable

  SSL based on the IP address of the connecting client.

• ACL range corrections  In previous

  versions of Mercury, access controls would not work correctly if the

  address range exceeded 256 addresses, and would occasionally work

  incorrectly with particular address ranges. These problems have now been

  fixed.

• Duplicate message suppression  You can now

  create an empty file called MSGIDS.MER in any mailbox directory (i.e, a

  directory where a .CNM file gets created), and this signals to Mercury

  that it should suppress duplicate messages in that mailbox. Duplicate

  detection is based on a combination of sender and message-ID, and only

  the last 200 messages delivered to the mailbox are actually remembered.

• MercuryC forced sender option  This option

  allows you to specify a single address MercuryC should use as the

  source of the mail it is sending when it is negotiating with the

  upstream "smart host". This option is quite technical, being buried in

  the depths of the SMTP transaction itself, and does not affect the

  "From" field in the message, or alter the contents of the message in any

  way, other than altering the Return-Path header that the smart host

  will write into the message. It is primarily aimed at users of services

  such as Yahoo Premium Mail, which require the SMTP "MAIL FROM" address

  to be the address of a known subscriber.

• Extended POP3 lockout detection  MercuryP

  now locks out any account with too many login failures for five minutes

  regardless of the address from which the lockout occurred. So, once any

  system has failed logging into a POP3 account, all systems are prevented

  from attempting to login to that account for five minutes. This feature

  is primarily aimed at botnets that attempt to crack passwords by

  logging in from successive different systems and trying

  username/password combinations until they fail, and is automatic.

• Fixes for MercuryI IMAP  MercuryI now

  saves UID lists any time they change: this should prevent UID

  synchronization problems from occurring, but may introduce small extra

  processing delays with very large folders. There have also been some

  changes in the way the IMAP SEARCH command is handled that should

  improve performance and reliability in a number of search scenarios (in

  some cases spectacularly), and MercuryI now caches FETCH data which

  should significantly improve performance and reduce load when clients

  like Apple Mail fetch messages a chunk at a time.

• MBXMAINT updated  The mailbox maintenance

  utility MBXMAINT has been heavily updated. It now fixes a wider range of

  problems, and can also correct folders where messages contain duplicate

  message identifiers (important for more reliable IMAP operation). The

  program has been split into a commandline version, MBXMAINT.EXE and a

  user-interface version, MXBMAINT_UI.EXE. Both versions have considerably

  better reporting and output.

• Random filename generation fixed  A very

  long-standing problem where the "random" filenames generated by Mercury

  were not very random and tended to repeat has finally been found and

  corrected. Mercury should now generate much more "random" filenames and

  the possibility of filename collisions should be dramatically lower as

  of this version.
  
  

Pegasus Mail v4.61 is now available for public download in English, German and Italian versions: the French version will be released shortly.

Version 4.61 is an interim release

– not quite version 5, but part of the way there. We're releasing it

primarily because it incorporates some important bug fixes, but it has

some extremely worthwhile new capabilities too.

New HTML renderer  HTML has

become increasingly common in e-mail, even though it is actually not

especially well-suited to the medium and is technically challenging to

implement there. Version 4.61 includes a new HTML renderer that uses the

built-in power of Internet Explorer to render HTML. Developed by

Michael in der Wiesche, this renderer has been exhaustively tested and

secured, and we believe it meets all our very high standards for

security. For people who really don't trust Internet Explorer, though,

Martin Ireland's BearHTML renderer has also been improved and can be

used instead with a single click of a button.
 

New graphics, updated interface

 Version 4.61 sports beautiful new graphics designed by Sven Henze. The

program is also most of the way towards a redesigned user interface with

a more "modern" 3D look. We believe the combination of Sven's graphics

and the new look make the program very attractive in a classical way.
 

Numerous bug fixes  including,

but not limited to the following: HTML messages with very long lines

will now render correctly; mailto: specifiers are now removed correctly

when adding addresses to addressbooks and lists; fixed crashes caused by

various types of malformed message; corrected the colour selector for

filtering rules; allowed folders to be dragged onto closed trays when

rearranging the folder hierarchy... and many more.
 

Accent expansion in the glossary

 you can now create accented characters using the Glossary Expansion key

(Ctrl+E in the English version). Simply type the base character

followed by the accent you want added, then press Ctrl+E. For example,

to create an e-acute character (é) simply type e' then press Ctrl+E. For

a complete table of the accented characters that can be created,

consult the full Pegasus Mail help file.
 

Confirm-reading prompts  You can

now have Pegasus Mail prompt you for whether or not a

confirmation-of-reading message is sent when a message contains a

request for one (the original options for always and never sending them

remain available as well). Make this change in the "Advanced" settings

page.
 

Size column for drafts and queued mail  The window that displays draft messages and messages in the sending queue now includes a size column, by popular request.
 

Attachment size controls  System

administrators wanting to control the maximum sizes of attachments sent

with the program can now do so by running the LIMITS.EXE program

supplied with the system. LIMITS.EXE allows you to specify both soft and

hard limits (a "soft" limit pops up a warning but still allows the user

to add the attachment, while a "hard" limit does not allow the

attachment to be added). LIMITS.EXE places values in the Windows

Registry, and system administrators may wish to remove it from the

installation directory to a location not accessible to users.
 

Commandline and GUI versions of MBXMAINT

 The Mailbox Maintenance utility, MBXMAINT, now comes as two versions:

MBXMAINT.EXE is a commandline utility that can be used in scripts, while

MBXMAINT_UI is the traditional GUI version of the application. Both

have also been slightly improved in the types of error conditions they

can handle.

to go to the Pegasus Mail home site downloads page, where you can find the v4.61 release.

Hello community,

I've loaded up a nice '20th Anniversary of Pegasus Mail'-button Gold; spread and use them on your site and in your signature.

http://pmail.praktit.se/files/folders/community_add-ons_for_pegasus_mail/entry21916.aspx

Pegasus Mail v4.52 is now available for public download.

V4.52 is all about allowing the program to work well under Windows 7: it can now use the new Microsoft mechanisms for registering itself as a system-level mail program (meaning it can be used to launch mailto: links from your web browser), and corrects a number of minor issues in previous versions, in particular the problem with some toolbar buttons either not displaying or displaying incorrectly. There are also some internal reliability fixes to do with the way certain types of folder damage are handled.

Producing a Windows-7-capable version of the program required migrating the Pegasus Mail source code from Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2008: we expected this process to be easy and quick, but we were wrong - Microsoft made it much more difficult than should ever have been necessary. This is the main reason it has taken us as long as it has to get this release out the door. An unfortunate side-effect of this is that Visual Studio 2008 generates applications that cannot be run under Windows 98 or ME. As a result, v4.52 no longer works on these older versions of Windows. As I've noted in the information on the main Pegasus Mail site, we will see what we can do about putting together at least a matching version of v4.52 that *can* run under Windows 98 and ME, but it's clear that we are not going to be able to support these systems for very much longer.

Pegasus Mail v4.52 can be downloaded from the main Pegasus Mail web site, at : it will be made available here on the community as soon as humanly possible.

Cheers!

-- David --

Pegasus Mail v4.51 is now available for unrestricted public distribution - please visit for downloads and information, or check the download pages here at the community. The release version has had significant work since the public beta at the end of last year, and has some powerful new capabilities, most notably the addition of autofiltering folders.

The release of v4.51 marks the end of one of the most difficult development periods in the history of the program, and it seems appropriate that it should coincide with my attempts to ensure the long-term survival of the package: from here, development should be both easier and faster, and I do not anticipate ever again having such a long delay between releases. Your assistance is crucial to making this happen though, and if you haven't already done so, I would ask that you read the open letter at the main web site and see if you are able to help. To all of you who have already pledged your support, I offer my sincere thanks.

No version of Pegasus Mail has ever been as extensively or exhaustively tested as v4.51 - it's been a huge job, but ultimately rewarding, and my test team and I hope that you really enjoy using it.

Cheers!

-- David Harris --
July 3rd 2009.

There was just a new important announcement from David:

/Rolf  

A release candidate for Mercury/32 v4.71 is now available at . We intend to make this available only at the community site for a week or so before releasing it on an unrestricted basis.

The big news in v4.71 is the ability to run as a native Windows Service: we (the test team) have been using it extensively in this mode for quite some time and it's really quite cool. There are quite a few other small new features in there, and over 200 fixes and corrections.

Feedback is welcome in the Mercury beta forum here.

Cheers!

-- David --

2009-02-14
Wiki On-Line
Today we welcome you to the all new pmail Wiki!

A Wiki is an on-line documentation repository, where you can contribute. The wiki supports both Pegasus Mail and Mercury MTA, and it is multilingual. Try it out at .

For a while there has been a wish to be able to extend the documentation of Pegasus Mail and Mercury Mail Transport Agent, plus concentrate information from various sources into one general repository. Today we proudly invite all users to contribute into creating the definitive guide to e-mailing in general, and about how the programs work in particular. All this will during 2009 be concentrated to http://wiki.pmail.com

In short time the knowledgebase documentation will be transferred onto the wiki, as well as the official software documentation, including help subsystems and development guides. Currently the closed beta team members concentrate in their free time on merging the documents, but this is a vast task. Pegasus Mail exists in several languages, but Mercury does not. Translation has always been a rather gigantic task. Both programs are used all over the world. Wiki.pmail.com therefore supports multiple languages, and you are all encouraged to pitch in and extend the documentation into your language.

Developers of daemons and extensions are most welcome to publish their how-to guides and accompanying documentation in this one place repository.

The basic idea of a wiki, is that anyone can suggest and contribute to completing the information. Seldom are the ones with deepest information equiped to write guides on how to use things, as the users themselves. At http://wiki.pmail.com anyone can add, correct or extend the information so that it is as comprehensible and complete as can be.

For those not so familiar with wikis, you may want to look at the original http://wikipedia.org site and you'll find a world of information. We have built http://wiki.pmail.com according to the same syntax, and on the same platform - to ease the use and contribution, and it is our hope that the pmail wiki will be of benefit to you all. The wiki contains a sandbox, were you can familiarize yourself with editing and contributing.

David has posted current development status reports about Pegasus Mail and Mercury Mail Server.

http://community.pmail.com/blogs/mercury32/archive/2009/02/02/current-status-of-mercury-32-v4-6.aspx

Download Links:

1. No download required, included in Mercury

2. MercFwd.Dll - Daemon to forward all email for one domain: Download from the community  or from the author site then click here

3. SmtpEx.Nlm and Wsmtpex.Exe: Forwards domain based email as separate program.

Community.Pmail.Com now has native support for the following languages, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Swedish, besides English.

We have also added international Community support forums in Dutch, French, German and Italian. The aim is to make community.pmail.com a natural point of interest and a global repository of information regarding the products: Pegasus Mail and Mercury Mail Transport System.

To enable your preferred languague, you have to set your language in your profile. Your profile is reachable by clicking your name, which is displayed at the top right of all community pages.

We've also made some minor changes to the forum names, and merged some quite similar forums into more obvious forums.

It is my personal hope that you find this change easier and more appealing in your use of the forums.

The Url to download this information is now:

http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/12808.aspx

Martin

Hello all,


Vote for Pegasus Mail at: a Dutch site about free software.

Thanks.

Downloads are now available from the community.

Pegasus Mail Public Beta v4.51 (German)

Please use the Beta forum for any discussions regarding the beta versions.
Forum posts will be moved when they relate to the beta and have been published in the wrong forums. We are aware that moving forum threads creates trouble for those that keep up with unread posts, so please adhere to this policy.

As many of you have noticed ( <wry grin> )  the time between releases has in recent years been getting longer and longer, both for Pegasus Mail and Mercury.

The long period between releases does not, however, mean that nothing is happening: there are numerous reasons for the longer development cycles, many of which I have covered in my blogs, and in the background, there are many, many releases of beta versions of the program that are only ever circulated to members of the current closed beta test teams. To give you an example, there have been 22 formal betas of Pegasus Mail v4.5, and numerous informal betas where I wanted to try out a specific feature.

After consultation with my closed test teams, we've reached the conclusion that the community and the quality of the programs would be best served if we opened up the beta testing process: making betas available publicly would allow wider testing, as well as giving a clear, visible indication that the programs are alive and in active development.

Accordingly, after the release of Pegasus Mail v4.5 (which will be very soon now - we're testing release candidates at present), I will be opening the beta process. Most betas will be made publicly available on this community for both programs, and forums will be provided for feedback. Betas will be provided without support, typically will not include installers, and will be intended to be installed only by experienced users.

Watch this space for further announcements.

Cheers!

-- David --