Software Update: Pegasus Mail 4.70

Although it wasn’t intended anymore, a version of Pegasus Mail from the 4.x series has been released. Pegasus Mail is an email program that has been around for over 25 years. In the beginning, it was ahead of its time, but its success has waned since Windows XP, when Microsoft included an email client with Windows with Outlook Express as standard. Its appearance has hardly changed since the early days and it lacks a calendar and newsreader. So the program is only for e-mailing, but that’s it good in. Version 4.70 brings some new things planned for version 5, such as OpenSSL and improved spell checking. The routines that control access to the Internet have also been rewritten and are now more robust and faster.

Pegasus Mail version 4.70

Pegasus Mail v4.70 is yet another interim release. Internally, this version of the program is actually very different from any previous version, and is well on the way to being a version 5 build, but it’s been a while since we’ve had a new version and there’s a clear need for the new OpenSSL-based SSL code I’ve developed for version 5 so I decided it was time to freeze a checkpoint in the development and bring it out.

OpenSSL support
Pegasus Mail now uses the industry-standard OpenSSL libraries to handle secure Internet connections. A major internal change, this should allow Pegasus Mail to connect to almost any SSL-secured server.

IMPORTANT NOTE: if you are using SSL connections to a version of Mercury earlier than the v4.8 release that parallels this release of Pegasus Mail, then you may need to turn on a new option in the Pegasus Mail SSL settings dialog you use to define the connection to the Mercury server.

Completely new multilingual spelling checker
Pegasus Mail now uses the “Hunspell” spelling checker used by OpenOffice, FireFox and other major systems. The new spelling checker supports multiple simultaneous languages ​​in the same check, and is supplied as standard with US and UK English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Czech dictionaries. Many other dictionaries are readily available, from sources such as the OpenOffice Extensions repository.

Completely new TCP/IP code
The routines Pegasus Mail uses to connect to the Internet have been totally rewritten, and should be faster and more reliable than ever before. It’s kind of sad, given how much effort this took, that most people probably won’t even notice it.

Hyperlink overhaul
The way Pegasus Mail locates and marks hyperlinks in plain-text messages has been completely overhauled. For properly-normalized links (that means, links enclosed in < and >) the program will now correctly find and mark them even if they span multiple lines in the message.

Updated and improved HTML rendering
Michael and Martin have been busy at work producing more updates to the HTML rendering technology in the program, and you should now find the quality of HTML display even higher than in previous versions.