Development Status of Pegasus Mail
Until 2006 all versions of Pegasus Mail were supplied free of charge, and printed user manuals were available for purchase. In January 2007 it was announced that distribution and development of Pegasus Mail had ceased due to inadequate financial support from the sale of the manuals. Later in the month, due to an avalanche of support from the user community, it was announced that development will resume. However, Pegasus Mail will change from freeware to donationware and Mercury will change to a licence for fee for configurations with more than a certain number of email boxes. A donation button was added to the website on 1 March 2007.
A public beta test version of version 4.5 was announced on 3 October 2008 which is stated to be "very complete and stable, but is provided without formal technical support - you should almost certainly apply due diligence testing to it before using it in a production environment". The new version has not only been developed further beyond earlier versions, but has been ported from now obsolete v5.02 of Borland C++ to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, a major undertaking in itself. A list of changes and other information is linked from here.
On 2 February 2009 David Harris said that bug reports from version 4.51 beta were being reviewed with the intention of getting a formal release out in the next few weeks.
On 19 June 2009 David Harris announced on the Pegasus Mail site that all development of Pegasus Mail and the associated Mercury program could only continue if sufficient users would commit to donating US$50 annually; on 21 July 2009 he said that there had been a good start.
On 3 July 2009 Pegasus Mail 4.51 (final) and Mercury/32 v4.72 were released.
On 23 January 2010 Pegasus Mail 4.52 (final) was released (includes improvements for Windows 7).
On 2 November 2010, David Harris posted the following message regarding the progress of development on the newest release of Pegasus Mail, PMail Version 5.0 : "Progress continues on the new contacts manager for Pegasus Mail version 5. The new contact manager uses an SQL-based back-end for storage, and offers an incredibly rich range of attributes and options: it will exist alongside the now aging Pegasus Mail addressbook format, and while existing addressbooks will continue to work, there will also be options to import their contents into the new contact manager database. The new code has been designed heavily with external synchronization in mind, but at least initially, we will not be including any built-in synchronization clients: there is an extensive API that other developers can use to perform synchronization (down to the attribute level) though, and as real-world usage solidifies after release, we will evaluate what synchronization clients might be most appropriate to provide as standard options. We hope to release an initial version of Pegasus Mail version 5 with the new contact manager in place either late in December this year, or early in 2011. A subsequent version with the entirely-new message store I have been working on for over a year will follow at a later stage. I'm personally very excited about the new contact manager - I believe it could have an enormous impact on the way many people work in a world of e-mail overload"
On 23 February 2011 Pegasus Mail 4.61 was released. It includes a new HTML renderer which uses the built-in Windows renderer of Internet Explorer, but the BearHTML renderer has also been improved and can be used instead. V. 4.61 has new graphics, an updated interface, a number of smaller changes or improvements and various bug fixes. v4.62 had improvements to the editor and elsewhere.
On 22 December 2011 bug fix version 4.63, expected to be the last release before version 5, became available.
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