I think that most network administrators naturally want to develop things that make network administrators necessary.

You can see that on many opensource development platforms: powerful tools in theory, but that need expert finish in order to become usable. You can also see that in the reports of some large public institutions that contemplated adopting opensource software: there is no economy, you just shift the budget from buying commercial software to hiring network administrators.

A programmer who needs money will on the contrary want to make a product that will immediately satisfy the client. I think the education market is craving for a simple tool that needs no network administrator.

So, technically, would it be like the Mercury/Pegasus that we know now? Yes, that's why I'm proposing it, it's feasable. But commercially, it would be a complete repackaging.

Just think of the market of primary schools alone. Just think 20 NZD for each primary school on the global market. It would not be a shame to package a toy-like version, would it?

It is really a priority that DH earns the money he deserves. And when I say a priority I mean it is really above the opinions of the supporters, me included. It is really above personal tastes.

This was raised before and some "hope" offered. See the following topic

B

I agree. The name as it was chosen by the sender.

The actual problem is that Pegasus Mail has to extract a temporary copy of the attachment from the message. That temporary copy filename is passed to Virscan and then the AV product to be scanned.  At some point the AV if running in realtime monitoring mode, detects the creation of this temporary file and calls the main AV engine to scan it. The startup of the AV engine may take some time. If it is found to be bad for any one of several  reasons, it will either delete or quarentine the file.

This then takes away the file for either Virscan or the AV file scan request. This may occur before/during/after the file has been opened by the application(s). It is this opening process, a system call that cannot handle a file being stolen away from its control.  That is why, preventing the AV from monitoring the new mail directory always is the solution.

Martin 

I just had to rescue a hard disk from a failed computer, for someone who receives important and strategic documents (legal cases).

I placed the sata disk in an empty sata box for external drives, and copy pasted the Mail folder. Ok, simple. But because I had time, I used a partition manager and reinstalled Pmail in a partition of its own. The disk will know have a second partition for Mail, a third for Documents, and even a fourth for an alternative Operating System (in case of virus).

From this I draw a few ideas about the mailbox of Pmail. It is not really suggestions it is more like long term dreams, waiting for your impressions.

Well first, the interface for changing mailbox location is not intuitive and orthodox now. Why do I have a "Change Now" button as I have changed nothing? And change what? What is "Default"? Normally I have the path, I click on "Browse" to open the explorer, I chose or create a folder, and then I click on "OK".

 But... wouldn't it be a good idea to add an option "Install Pmail in a partition of its own" ???

Ideally, I would install the mailbox in another physical drive, away from C:, but even then, a specific partition would be safer. The interface would just ask for the location and the size of the new partition.

It seems that Pmail considers the voluntary closing of Windows as an accident. Consequently it gives me a warning each time I re-open the application.

A warning which prevents me to access the mail folders, which I have to close each time before I can begin working, and which is annoying because my voluntary closing of Windows was definitely not a system failure, blue screen or anything threatening.

And now, the beta version has added the annoyance of also warning me each time that there are saved messages. I could understand warning me that there are messages waiting to be sent, but saved... if they are saved it is obviously because I didn't want to send them.

I would like Pmail not to worry about my saved messages, and not to fight against my use of the machine.

I've wondered about this for years.  The easiest way _I_ can think of would be to add an option you can get to by r-clicking the sent folder (or one of the messages in it).

Just to say I bit the bullet and installed 4.51, with the workarounds above, updating by 5 years? It's great, many small bugs and irritations have been fixed, the message editor works much better, it's faster too.

I am not sure I understand.  The author of a message is responsible for inserting a Content-Description but Pegasus Mail does the equivalent to this by inserting a Content-Type, along with its Type= sub-descriptor. ie

  Content-type: Application/Octet-stream; name="UserChoice.reg.unicode"; type=Unknown

Martin

I don't recall seeing this suggested before, but it seems like a pretty obvious missing 'feature'.  When adding a mailbox (Folders->Add mailbox...) you have to manually type in the path.  Clearly this interface hasn't been looked at in the last 15 years...?

I find myself using multiple mailboxes on a regular basis now, mainly as a means of separating archives.  It's really painful having to type in path names, especially if the folders are kept in my user profile (C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\<lots more sub folders>).

I've just found out that this only occurs with Pegagus in folder preview mode. I've recently switched back to folder list mode and found that the keyboard shortcuts work as normal when starting a new message by right-clicking the Pmail icon in the system tray. (I thought it was a minor thing, anyway, but just thought I'd mention it by way of feedback.)

David has written on his current position on open source.

http://pmail.com/sundry/pmlinux.htm

Only from the New Mail folder !!  So that's why I can't do it !
Also, when a file is deleted, the file name is deleted too.  It would be useful to retain this in the message attachment display so that the message and filenames remain as a record of when and from whom you received the attachment.
I note that the filenames are still shown at thebottom of the "raw view" message tab, so the information is not lost - but could be more helpfully displayed.
For those who wonder why I want to delete the file from the message, the main reason is to save space, once the file has been saved inanother appropriate location.  Also, when ransferring Pegasus between computers as I frequently do when taking my laptop on trips away from home, it speeds things up a bit and means there is no risk that the PMAIL files won't all fit on a memory stick.  Yes, I could get a bigger memory stick.

There is a little something that has been irking me since the nineties.

I was a total newbie at the time and whenever I sent ONE message, Pmail told me it was sending TWO in the status bar.

Then as I shifted to DSL, and I forgot about it because the transfer is so fast I don't have time to read the status bar. However, if this little inconvenience could be removed, it would be quite an improvement. I can imagine it must be quite shocking when a new user discovers that, for instance during a server slowdown.

And PLEASE, please nobody tell me there is a technical necessity, or a historical reason, for keeping this weird misleading message. Or that my suggestion is wrong, or that it is very well as it is, or that I have to open a file and change the code myself, etc etc etc

Hi !

There is also this thread (which is more a generalization of the initial idea) :

Cheers !

Whiskyfizz.

Thanks to both of you for the information.

I've just composed a message and sent it to many people. 15 or so in the To field, and probably the same again in the BCC field.

My issue is this: Even with all those recipients being in my address book and "Aliased", thus making their names shorter than their full mail address, I got frustrated when checking who was included because there simply isn't enough on-screen space to show many recipients. Can we perhaps get fields that expand to show a few more lines (if not all) of recipient names?

Thank you and goodnight.

Well, Sharkfin, I have to agree with you.

The user doesn't have to "fix" what is incorrect behaviour from the application. A message not sent should nor be marked a sent, dot.

[quote user="msch"]

As a "early adopter" of pmail I know that many years ago there was a macintosh version of pmail (Version 2.2.1).

The mac becomes very popular and many windows users change to the mac. 

Is it planned to deveolp this fine peace of software for the mac?

[/quote]

I also use a Mac quite a lot, too - in fact, more than I use Windows.  My guess is that you're never going to see that.

I think you have to remember that back in those days David was one of the first people to put mail clients out there.  Now there are dozens of 'em for several platforms.  And, at the same time, people are drifting away from having local clients to using services like Gmail in their browser.  It's a crowded field now.

 And, in addition, the programs have got more complicated and are offering more.  People now require HTML rendering/composition, IMAP (possibly including recent extensions such as user-defined IMAP keywords (see here:  http://deflexion.com/2006/05/server-side-message-labels  ) ), integration with calendaring applications, maybe RSS reading, and so it goes on ...

The bundled mailer on Mac OS X - Mail.app - which, despite some quirks, is actually pretty good, integrates with iCal.app (Apple's ical-aware calendar), Address Book.app, and iPhoto.  It also has "data detectors" to scoop information out of emails:

[quote]Mail automatically detects text fragments like appointments and

addresses, and lets you choose smart actions with a click: create a new

contact, map an address, or create an iCal event.[/quote]

You can also send an HTML page straight out of the bundled browser to it with a keyboard shortcut.  And it will also sync with a copy of Mobile Mail.app on an iPhone or iPod Touch via iTunes - important for anyone who has one of those devices in addition to a Mac.

How are third-parties to compete with that?   And yet some already are offering programs, which further narrows the field: Mac users could also run Entourage (from Microsoft), Thunderbird, Eudora, PowerMail, Gyazmail, Outspring Mail, Mulberry, GNUMail, Correo, Opera Mail, Mailsmith, Odysseus, and a number of others.  Or they could run any of the standard Unix Mailers under X11 - Evolution, KMail, Sylpheed Claws, etc.

I'd think anyone writing yet another email client for OS X would be taking on a lot of work for a small (even if growing) sector of the market that's already pretty crowded.  And how would they manage stuff like synching with the iPhone's mailer?

If you do want to run Pegasus when using a Mac, you could run the Windows version using virtualization software such as Parallels or Fusion to run Windows inside OS X.

I just realized that, in the Mailbox window, the icons for folders are envelopes and not folders.

The orthodoxy is that closed folders look exactly like the opened folder, but closed. In the orthodoxy too, an evelope means a message, not a folder of messages.

It could be a good idea to avail ourselves of this opportunity to provide folder icons of the same color as the names of folders (green, black...)