Pegasus Mail: E-Mail Made Easy

Free, full-featured e-mail application is good for beginners and power users alike.

Linda L. Grubbs

Linda L. Grubbs is a staff editor for PCWorld.com.

Snail mail is dead; long live e-mail! Electronic mail is supposed to be the quicker, easier way to send and receive messages. But if you have more than one e-mail account, collecting your messages can be a tedious if not downright disastrous task.

Wouldn't it be nice to log on once and retrieve all your e-mail from a single interface? Fortunately, with the freeware Pegasus Mail application, you can.

Enter Pegasus Mail

Pegasus Mail boasts all the standard features you'd expect to find in a good e-mail program: Other than checking and sending e-mail, you can drag and drop addresses into a message, create address books, and manage rules for filtering mail.

But what sets Pegasus Mail apart from other free e-mail clients is its features: Pegasus can check multiple e-mail accounts through a single interface, and it can connect to both POP- and IMAP-based mail servers, the two most common types for both business and home. (The latest versions of these protocols are POP3 and IMAP4.) And best of all, Pegasus doesn't force you to choose between reduced features and advertising; you get the full functionality with no ads. We'll show you how to set up the program and how to customize some of its key features.

Install and Configure Pegasus Mail

To begin, download the installer application and remember where on your hard drive you save it.

Download Pegasus Mail from PCWorld.com.

Next, make sure you have the following information handy for each account you'll be checking:

• The e-mail address and password for each of your mail accounts.
• The address of your POP or IMAP (incoming mail) server.
• The address of your STMP (outgoing mail) server. Often, but not always, this is the same address as the POP or IMAP server.

If you don't know this information yourself, your Internet service provider will have it for you.

When you double-click the installer, Pegasus will first ask you if you want to be able to send mail with more than one return address or if you want to receive mail from multiple mailboxes. Click the middle icon if you plan to use Pegasus to check multiple e-mail accounts, or click the top icon if you plan to use it for a single mail account.

Pegasus Mail then will ask you where to put its mail file. The program uses C:\PMAIL\MAIL as the default location where it stores mail messages. If you installed the application anywhere other than the default installation folder of C:\PMAIL (for example, C:\Program Files\PMAIL), make sure you change the default mail file path to match where you installed Pegasus (in this example, C:\Program Files\PMAIL\MAIL).

Create Your User List

Next, you'll see a dialog named Create Initial Pegasus Mail Users. Click the New button to add a new user, and enter a username for yourself and your full name. If you also want to let someone else use the same computer to check his or her mail account(s), you'll want to repeat this process. Pegasus Mail uses this name to keep track of which accounts belong to which people; this username doesn't have to be the same as your POP3 mail server username.

Fill in the check box next to Administrator Privileges for your username. If you plan to use Pegasus to check multiple accounts, make sure at least one user is set up to have Administrator Privileges. Click OK. When you're finished entering names, click the Close button.

POP Goes the Mailbox

Next, Pegasus Mail will ask you to enter a username you gave Pegasus Mail in the Create Users dialog. Type the name in the Username field and click OK. The application will begin asking for the settings for your POP3 mail account. Enter your full e-mail address, then click Next. In the following dialog, the program will ask you to enter the POP3 server you use to check your mail. Enter the server address in the field and click Next. If you don't know this stuff yet, don't worry; you can cancel out and enter it later using File, Network Configuration. (If your ISP doesn't use POP3, click Cancel and scroll to If You Use IMAP Instead of POP3 below.)

Pegasus will next ask for your POP3 username and password. Your POP3 username is the part of your e-mail address to the left of the @ symbol and does not necessarily have to be the same as your Pegasus Mail username. Enter the information and click Next, then enter the address of your SMTP server (if necessary) and click Next again.

Lastly, the wizard will ask how you connect to the Internet. Click the Network radio button if you will use the program at the office on a LAN or at home using a cable or digital subscriber line modem. Otherwise just click Next, then click Finish.

If You Use IMAP Instead of POP3

If one or more of your e-mail accounts uses IMAP instead of POP3, there are a few extra steps you'll need to take. Pegasus Mail asks for the setup information in a separate IMAP Profiles dialog box you can reach by choosing Tools, IMAP Profiles.

To create a profile, click the New button in the Manage IMAP Profiles dialog box. Pegasus will ask you to create a name for the profile, enter the IMAP server address, and enter your username and account password for that server. Every IMAP server setup is different, so you may need to ask your mail administrator for the path to your IMAP mail directory; enter that in the field labeled Mailbox Reference. Check the options that you need or want for your mailbox to work properly and click OK.

If you always want Pegasus Mail to connect to your IMAP server as soon as you run the program, fill in the check box labeled "Always connect to this profile at startup." If you want to connect manually, leave this check box blank and click the Connect button on the Manage IMAP Profiles dialog box each time you want to check that account's mail.

Sending, Receiving, and Filtering Mail

Pegasus Mail's intuitive interface makes sending and receiving mail a no-brainer. To open the program, click Start, Programs, Pegasus Mail for Win32, Pegasus Mail for Win32. When the program starts, you'll be asked to enter the Pegasus username you chose when you first set up your mail accounts.

You may want to adjust a couple of settings, such as whether to delete messages after they've been read or hear an alert sound when new mail arrives. To access these options, go to Tools, Options and configure the program to your liking. The Options menus let you configure virtually every aspect of the interface.

Quick Mail Checking

With just one click on one of the three little world-globe icons on the toolbar you can send queued mail (the icon with the blue arrow on its left), check for incoming mail (the icon with the red arrow on its right), or do both (the icon with both a red and blue arrow). You can also carry out each task individually by selecting the task from the File menu. As with other mail programs, you can also add attachments to your messages, create mail distribution lists, or ask for confirmation of delivery.

One cool feature that sets Pegasus Mail apart from other e-mail programs is that you can drag and drop e-mail addresses from old mail into a new message. To do this, click File, New Message, Standard Message, then click File, Mail Folders, select the folder you want to open, and click the Open icon. Highlight the address you want from the old e-mail and then drag it to the appropriate field in the new message window.

Filter Your Mail

Perhaps the best feature of Pegasus Mail is its easy-to-use mail-filtering system. If you want to better manage mail overload and junk mail, you can redirect messages from your mailing lists or from family and friends into predefined folders. You can also set triggers (a set of conditions that apply to a message) for certain types of mail. The best part of all is that once you define the filters, they work automatically every time you retrieve your mail.

Let's say that you're at work and you don't have the time to read e-mail from your favorite mailing list, the PC World WorldWatch. You don't want to delete the messages; you want peruse them at your leisure. Just set up a filter that identifies all of the mail from the list and move it out of the in-box to another folder.

First, you have to create a folder. To do this, select File, Mail Folders and click the New icon. Name the folder something memorable (like WorldWatch) and click OK. Indicate if you want it to be a message folder (that contains messages) or a filing tray (that contains other folders but not messages).

Next, you set up a filter that moves WorldWatch mail into its specific folder. Click Tools, Mail Filtering Rules, Edit New Mail Filtering Rules, Rules Applied When Folder Is Opened, and click the Add Rule icon (the big blue plus sign). In the Edit Rule dialog box that appears, we're going to use the Standard Header Match rule (the first choice in the pull-down menu) and enter the criteria (the word "WorldWatch") for filtering our mail. Then, we'll check all of the boxes that apply (in our example, we'll just choose Subject).

Finally, you'll have to decide on the action you want to take and select it from pull-down menu. In our case, we want to move mail into a message folder, so we'll click the Action to take drop-down menu and choose Move, then pick the WorldWatch folder we created from the list that pops up and click the Open button. A New Mail Filtering Rules dialog box will come up. Click OK to be finished.