Pegasus Mail and Mercury Developer News

Pegasus Mail and Mercury Developer News
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February 2024 - The Path Forward

So. Another new year.

I regard 2023 as a year best forgotten — after a serious leg injury in the middle of the year (caused, I am ashamed to say, by falling off a ladder), I am finally able to sit down for long enough to work on a sustained basis, and there's no doubt I have a lot of catching up to do.

In this posting, I'd like to give a brief overview of what my development plans and priorities are for the next year.

Moving to Win64 and newer compiler technologies

At the end of this year, Microsoft have said that they plan to phase out support for Win32 applications, a vast body of widely-used code that includes both Pegasus Mail and Mercury. Win32 applications will need to be adapted to Win64, using 64-bit compilation. For Pegasus Mail and Mercury, this is not especially difficult nor even a very large job, although it offers no advantages either - it's just work that has to be done because Microsoft says so. The largest problem with moving to Win64 is the editor module I use in Pegasus Mail, which is a licensed product, and for which the developer has said he will charge a significant licensing fee for a Win64 version. I have basically no financial resources any more, so I may have to ask for help from my user community to fund this upgrade - I will pass on more about this as it becomes clearer.

Moving to Win64 also means moving to more modern compilers (the main software tool I use to create the programs), although I took care of that upgrade a couple of years ago and it is well in hand. There will be a period of testing and evaluation to make sure there are no bugs introduced by the compiler upgrades, but I do not expect any real problems here.

Mercury

The main priorities for Mercury this year are:

Support for DKIM, a message authentication method that is becoming increasingly important for communicating with users at large sites like Gmail and Outlook.com. This is well advanced, and will be the first thing released this year.

Support for Gmail OAUTH2, to allow the MercuryD distributing POP3 module to continue working in that environment. This should be trivially easy (I should be able to use the module I developed for Pegasus Mail with no alteration), but it rather depends on how many hoops Google require me to jump through.

Completing the separation of the core Mercury engine from its user interface. This code has actually been complete for quite some time, but circumstances have never quite been right to incorporate it in the program. That will change this year.

Overhauling the mailing list manager: Mercury's mailing list manager is one of its best features (so people tell me), but it's showing its age a bit. I plan a major redevelopment of this code over the course of 2024 to make everything more consistent, easier to manage, and to add new features that people have been suggesting for a while.

More web-based user-focused capabilities: I want to provide convenient, simple web-based interfaces to allow users to adjust their mail-related settings (like autoforwarding, autoreplies, whitelisting, and logging, to name a few).

Support for ACME, the protocol that allows the automated use of free SSL certificates from suppliers like Let's Encrypt. This is now well into planning and should be a very welcome early addition to the program this year.

A new mystery feature. I'll only say at this point that it is privacy-focused but it's something I've wanted myself for a long time. More on this over the course of the year.

Pegasus Mail

The world is full of miscalculations: mine, for a long time, has been believing that I could completely reinvent a program as large and complex as Pegasus Mail on my own. I am finally coming to accept that my vision of a completely new Pegasus Mail is probably unachievable in a human lifetime - after all, it took me twenty years to get it to where it was when I decided it needed to be rebuilt, and those were in much simpler and better-resourced times.

I have now decided that I am going to shift my focus in Pegasus Mail from trying to build a completely new product, to adding the powerful new components I have been working on for so long to the current codebase, which will allow me to move things forward at last, adding new capabilities while preserving much of the existing look and feel of the program to make it easier for my user community to adapt to them. Over time, I will develop that look and feel to more modern norms, but for now, the emphasis will be on adding powerful new features.

The first new components I will be adding will be the new contact manager, a very rich replacement for the ageing Pegasus Mail addressbook format; and a completely new message store called "M3", a vast improvement on the current foldering code in the program, which supports all your existing data, is much faster and richer, and offers a new, ultra-efficient and encrypted folder format capable of holding millions of messages. Both these components are essentially complete and thus can be added to the program over the course of this year.

My overriding priority in Pegasus Mail going forward is privacy — making sure that your mail remains your mail, with significant support for encryption, both in mail sent, and local storage, so you can expect to see features like S/MIME encrypted and signed mail support starting to appear in the program this year as well (the code to handle these capabilities is already working here).

Communication

I realize that I have not communicated as well as I might have liked for the last couple of years; in truth, I have been... well, I guess the only term would be "burnt out" on daily mail handling for quite some time now, and I'm just no longer as good at being a proactive communicator as I might once have been. It is my aim to improve that this year, with more frequent developer updates, and at least a little more direct involvement in the Community.

So there it is in the proverbial nutshell — a range of plans for the year ahead. I hope you'll stay with me and help me take the programs to the new places we'd all like to see it reach.

Cheers!

-- David --