SCN: Pegasus

[Joe Mabel]

OK, so I'm replying to 11-week-old email.  Sue me.

This seemed interesting at the time, but there seems to have been no followup 
other than a couple of people saying, "Yes I've used it, it's cool."

Since this supports both POP3 and IMAP4, it is presumably a suitable mail client 
to use with SCN, right? And the free nature of the product would seem to fit 
right in with what we do, right? So why don't we add something to our site 
telling people how to get Pegasus Mail and how to configure it to access SCN as 
their mail server?

Is there a reason this shouldn't happen? If not, is there someone who can take 
the ball and run with it?

While I'm on the subject
(1) We've been saying for a long time that IMAP is "coming soon".  Any ETA?
(2) Considering that the SCN Free Services are a pretty important part of what 
we do, they sure are BURIED on our Home page. Strirtly "below the fold" (you 
have to scroll down to find the none-too-prominent link). At least we shoudl do 
a feature article on them now and then, sort of a "site of the week" about 
ourselves!

We feature prominently the contribution info, and volunteering. Why don't we 
dedicate an equally prominent space to what we offer back?

Lee's new redesign (http://www.scn.org/~lee/scntesta.html) is better in this 
respect ("Freebies" is "above the fold at 
1024 x 768), but I'd still move "about SCN" down lower and get both "donations" 
and "freebies" above the fold at 800 x 600.

--------------------
Joe Mabel

On Sat, 29 Dec 2001, Steve wrote:

> x-no-archive: yes
> 
> ==================
> 
> Note:  I've been using Pegasus for several years.  If you decide to 
> try it, I'd recommend downloading version 3.12c, at least until a few 
> version 4 problems get ironed out...
> 
> ==================
> 
> (Eric Lee, Scottish Socialist Voice, excerpts)---In my column last 
> week I mentioned an email program called Pegasus Mail. 
> 
> Pegasus Mail should interest socialists for a few reasons.  
> 
> First of all, it is absolutely free of charge.  Unlike, say, Eudora, 
> which shows advertising, Pegasus Mail is completely commercial-
> free as well.  
> 
> Second, it is not the product of some giant corporation.  Pegasus 
> Mail was written by one guy - David Harris, who lives in Dunedin, 
> New Zealand.  
> 
> Harris first wrote Pegasus Mail back in 1989 when he realised that 
> the university he was employed by needed an email program. 
> People liked what he wrote, it got passed around, and over time 
> became one of the most popular pieces of software ever written.  
> 
> He says of Pegasus Mail that "it dates from the time when the 
> Internet was a community rather than just a highway - when people 
> helped each other without worrying too much about who was going 
> to pay for it."  
> 
> Harris doesn't appear to have made any money from this.  He 
> seems prepared to sell you a manual for the program, if you want, 
> but that's hardly the kind of aggressive marketing one is used to 
> these days.  But Harris has apparently sold enough copies of the 
> manuals to keep himself going, and has devoted the last 18 
> months to rewriting his software from scratch.  
> 
> Over those last few months, Harris has written tens of thousands 
> of lines of code, made some 2,500 changes to the previous 
> version, and in early November this year announced the long-
> delayed release of a much improved version of the software, 
> Pegasus Mail version 4.  
> 
> It many ways, it is a superior program to the ones produced by the 
> giant, U.S.-based corporations with their teams of hundreds of 
> programmers.  
> 
> Harris claims to have invented filtering for email, and Pegasus Mail 
> still has a very powerful mechanism for sorting out junk mail.  In 
> fact it's so powerful that you can easily use Pegasus Mail to run 
> electronic mailing lists.
> 
> While corporations like Microsoft employ teams of testers and 
> quality control experts, Harris relies on a network of volunteer 
> testers who are given pre-release versions of the software.  
> 
> All of this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about how 
> software works, or how the computer industry works.  
> 
> Bigger is not necessarily better.  Software you pay for is not 
> always better than software that is given away for free.  
> 
> People are sometimes prepared to devote many hours of their time 
> in a labour of love to create a computer program that is a proudly-
> crafted piece of work - rather than a buggy, assembly-line 
> produced piece of "bloatware"...
> 
> According to the proponents of free market capitalism, idealists like 
> David Harris should not even exist.  They should not be writing 
> things like this: "Giving away Pegasus Mail seemed to be a means 
> by which I could try to make communication more accessible to a 
> much wider range of people who needed it."  
> 
> If the capitalist view of the way things worked was right, Pegasus 
> Mail should never have been created.  It should never have 
> succeeded when pitted against products produced by corporate 
> giants.  
> 
> But it did.  
> 
> For a decade now, Pegasus Mail has been the email program of 
> choice for millions of Internet users.  
> 
> Today, with the commercialisation of the web, dominated by 
> Microsoft and AOL, the act of downloading and using Pegasus 
> Mail is almost an act of defiance, of rebellion.  
> 
> From my point of view, it's not only the best email program 
> available today - it's the one all socialists should use, and promote. 
>  
> More details about Pegasus Mail can be found at www.pmail.com.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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