Hi !

Well, I am sorry but I did not suggest the code to be open source. I was just suggesting that being a huge program, should the idea of changing the coding language to make it available on other systems (which could significantly increase the user base, and thus by extension financial support) be given some thought, to help the translation, maybe some parts could be "open-sourced" for a given time period. Of course, those 15 years of coding and suffering are not to be thrown away, and that is not what I suggested. I apologize if my post was understood in this way.

However, given your answer, it seems Pegasus mail is a complex program, not only by the number of lines, but also by "nature", so I guess my suggestion is not very doable. The folks coding Wine seems to be the way to go, at least for Linux systems.

I am happy to hear that the add-on portion will be greatly improved in a direction where the community could contribute more easily. On that note, I really hope it will become fully skinable. But I guess, those features will be dealt with after the new and promising Mailstore and contact manager.

Cheers !

Hi all !

Pegasus Mail is an exclusive Windows program (and one of the few reasons I did not ditch it) and I think, it could increase significantly the user base if it became a cross-platform software. For that, it would be necessary to "translate" the actual code into another one. For the sake of this post, let's choose python. This is a daunting task, but still why not think it through even hypothetically. Here are some questions to initiate the discussion :

(1) How much time would it take to achieve such a translation ?

(2) Could it be considered to make some parts of the code temporarily open source and ask the help of the community for the translation ?

(3) How much money would be needed to successfully make the translation ?

(4) Could this kind of goal be funded through crowdfunding and other types of community funding ?

What do you think ?

Cheers !

This series of questions come up from time to time, so to help clear the water a little, here is my unofficial viewpoint on this.

• The current version of Pegasus Mail is based on Visual C, which is an enhancement on the original C++. Multiple Visual C++ derivatives on differing platforms do exist
  
• The encryption support, current and future (Cryptlib and OpenSSL) are both C based, though both offer other languages
  
• The Html webpage support is base on two third party rendering engines (Htmlview and I.E)
• Third party volunteer support extensions for Pegasus Mail are written in several languages, such as Pascal, Delphi, C++, Visual C, and macro languages such as Javascript.
• The third party rich text (Rtf and Html) editor, is proprietary and licensed from the vendor.
• The code used in creating Pegasus Mail is shared in part between Pegasus Mail and its sister product, Mercury
• Pegasus Mail is a Windows application that exploits functions unique to Windows

The main question you ask is about David releasing his code to the Open Community, and with 10-15 years invested in Pegasus Mail (DOS and Windows), I very much doubt he would ever give away his code in any fashion. Instead we are likely to see a major enhancement to the add-on/extension interfaces which will allow developers to develop ideas and directions that others may want to follow, while remaining true to the original product design.

Finally, as a comment too, Pegasus Mail was ported, to Apple some time ago, but was not well received due to Operating System compatabilty/capability problems.  The closest language to C is still Java but the third party requirements for Pegasus Mail would likely not be possible.

 Martin