This is a great example of a program that succeeds because it is free, but would not be competitive as commercial software. However, for what it does offer it does so efficiently for the price, despite having some major flaws which make it periodically less than useful, and infuriatingly off-the-mark for the tasks that face real-world users. While there is no guiding principle by which it errs, a general context can be found in the tendency of programmers and committees to dream up features which sound good on paper but translate, through a series of assumptions and compromises, into "features" which often introduce as many problems as they remove. In this respect, there is a shocking similarity between the work of David Harris's programming team and Redmond, WA giant Microsoft: both appear to be guided by logical assumptions made at too far a distance of abstraction from the system in which the end product must work.

What Pegasus does well can be characterized in a manner similar to that of a sports car description: it's sporty, small and fast, and with quick handling and few pretensions is a lot of fun to drive on day to day tasks. It has fast sorting/searching routines and intelligent interfaces for either task, as well as means of preserving and referring back to the sorted output. Its basic layout is inoffensive and distills almost twenty years of visual mail clients into an easily-grasped and easily used construction. While these major attributes are well done, there are crowning glories which should not be overlooked: the use of interstitial menus to group what would otherwise be a clutter of options, for example in replying to messages or extracting attachments in bulk. Intuitive questions and small features in each of these transitional menus are well done and turn some otherwise odious tasks into insolently quick drills. For example, there are logical menus which pop up when saving emails or saving files from emails; the attachments interstitial is intelligent enough to ask whether filenames should follow the encoded filenames, be guessed or be created from a single prompted name suffixed with sequential numbers. These things are all very positive and make aspects of Pegasus a joy to use.

The list of failings is much longer, which in itself should be construed as a success for the program as a whole that it inspires detailed inspection. First, the feature that seemed important two years ago but now is almost dead as far as serious emailers are concerned, HTML-enabled mail, is a complete nest of problems. Display errors occur frequently, and often, a display error will knock out the program's ability to display ANYTHING correctly until rebooted. Some HTML fails to be displayed but the mailer isn't smart enough to return to a default of text-only, and as a result the novice user sees often a blank email where text exists. Worse, if you try to opt out of having HTML mail displayed on your machine, the nightmare begins. Pegasus (unbelievably) cannot wrap lines correctly in text email, and so you will end up scrolling 1,024 characters to the edge of the screen to see if you can read your email line-by-line. Often these lines are also cut off and require that one go into "raw view" to stumble through headers and text in order to find the bulk of the message. Sometimes upon encountering an HTML message, the mailer becomes skewed enough that it fails to display its own menu buttons and/or locks up and crashes. Other more complicated "professional mailer" aspects are absent from this shareware contender; some attachments which decode well on Eudora and Outlook systems put Pegasus into denial, in which it refuses to acknowledge the attachment or even attract it (workaround: save the file to text with a .mim extension and use a program such as PKWARE's winzip to extract the contents). These are the major problems which the average user will encounter.

On the more serious side, Pegasus has some fundamental instability issues that threaten any pretense of usability it might have. Checking email of diverse types of encoding or encapsulation often produces crashes; worse, the system presents a threatening looking window that warns against overwriting the active mail file, but provides no method of recovery or workaround. If you look in the help file, you're completely screwed; not only is the help system missing many, many fundamental parts required to describe how Pegasus works, but the number of terms available to the search function is bafflingly low, leaving the user to forage through general description pages with an absence of specific solutions. Further, many basic issues that are necessary for use as a corporate, home, or educational user are simply missing; the help system, while clever and slick in many of its devices, doesn't extend far enough and is wholly solipsistic in how it imagines users will search for support answers. In addition to these structural flaws, there are some minor failings like an address database which frequently corrupts its own listings, periodic encoding issues that completely fail, window sizing which resets itself to awkward dimensions, and a tendency to sometimes stall when connecting to pop mailboxes.

While this seems a brutal load of problems to consider initially, look at the bright side: for an individual or educational user, Pegasus is free. It does most things correctly, unless you want to avoid the buggy HTML-mode of email. And while it has some major flaws, it overcomes many of those with basic operational workarounds which are awkward but effective. However, I find myself baffled that this program is as popular as it is, until I look at the competition. There are few shareware or freeware mailers that have any operational finesse, or even look stable. So back to our initial comment: there's a reason they give this away for free - this software is good for the price, but can't stand up to the commercial competitors if offered on the same level.