Labs

Pegasus Mail is fairly small, at 5.77MB. It's designed for network use, and the default installation creates two icons in the Windows Start menu, one for system administrators, labelled Start Pegasus Mail as Admin.

Though not as quick and easy as Thunderbird's Outlook migration wizard, Pegasus's startup questionnaire allows you to get going swiftly. It begins by assuming that you're using the program to download messages from just one mail account. To add more, you'll have to enter the program's rather tortuous manual settings to configure them. When setting the program up to download mail by POP3 from a Gmail account, this proved necessary in any case. Pegasus guessed the ports to be used for both POP3 (sending) and SMTP (receiving), and got them wrong.

When we asked Pegasus to download mail, at first we thought nothing had happened. But after a short pause, Pegasus informed us that it was "identifying unread messages". The process of grabbing our existing POP3 mail from the server was very slow. If you are using a dial-up modem to download email using Pegasus while away from home, we'd advise configuring Gmail to enable POP3 for new messages. Otherwise, downloading the entire contents of your mailbox, from the oldest

The reason for these glitches is that Pegasus prefers its mail from an IMAP server. This type of server enables mail clients to look at messages without having to download them from the server. For those intending to use Pegasus on a network, its writer David Harris provides a free IMAP server, Mercury/32, on his website.

Pegasus contains some handy features for business users. It can, for instance, allow you to create several users or 'identities' on a single PC, with separate mail settings, although these can't be password-protected from each other. It also allows users to create different signatures for their mail, depending on whether they're sending it internally or not.

The program is also zealous when it comes to security. It uses a points-based system for identifying spam rather than the Bayesian method used by Thunderbird. On downloading our existing mailbox contents, it automatically consigned over half the messages to its 'Junk or suspicious' mail folder. Correcting this involved creating new rules to exclude certain key phrases such as those to do with eBay notifications and so on. Pegasus also claims to be immune from exploits that take advantage of image rendering in other email clients' HTML preview windows.

Pegasus mail has a long history, but compared to the user-friendly interfaces offered by Thunderbird, it's looking long in the tooth. It will run on a remarkably low-spec computer, and its multi-user, multi-account options and security tools will appeal to tech-savvy corporate types. But with many of the program's features hidden behind confusing menus and a general lack of help, home users should steer clear.