Version 4.41 is the release that was never meant to be...  After the release of v4.31, it was my intention to begin work on Pegasus Mail v5, in which the core capabilities of the program will be heavily extended - new addressbook, a group calendar, new folder formats and a new programming interface. Then I received an offer from one of my test team, a very clever man from the Czech republic called Lukas Gebauer. Lukas asked me if I would like to collaborate with him in integrating his Spamhalter Bayesian Spam Filter into Pegasus Mail. Now, Pegasus Mail has had a rule-based spam filter called Content Control for quite some time, but it requires constant maintenance. A Bayesian Spam Filter, with its automatic learning and minimal maintenance, was too good an addition to pass up. As a result, I decided it would be worth adding a little extra delay to the v5 developments to make this powerful new addition available to my user community. Read on for more information, or click here to go to the downloads page and retrieve v4.41.

In this version...

Spamhalter  Lukas's Spamhalter plugin is a fully-fledged Bayesian Spam Filter for Pegasus Mail. It learns automatically from the mail you receive and moves anything that it thinks is spam into a folder you designate as your "spam folder". Training Spamhalter is easy - just move any spam it misses into your spam folder and it will automatically learn from it. Similarly, move any false positives (mail it mis-identifies as spam) out of the spam folder to any other location and it will be trained on them as not-spam. Spamhalter is comprehensively integrated with the program - you can right-click any message and train it as spam or not-spam (without even moving it in or out of the spam folder), and you can get explanations of what caught Spamhalter's interest in the message: you can even sort and group messages by their level of "spamminess". Combined with Pegasus Mail's existing Content Control and General filtering capabilities, Spamhalter provides a level of filtering power other applications can't even dream about.

Mail Merge built into the program  Pegasus Mail has shipped with a simple but effective mail merge plugin for many years, but as times have changed, so people have found they want to do more and more with their merges. Pegasus Mail now has mail merge built in as a core function - as a tab on the standard message editor you use every day. The new mail merge allows you to use formatting, tables and graphics in your merged messages, and even to merge attachments into your messages. What's more, the new "dry run" capability allows you to preview the exact appearance of your merge before you actually send it out.

Global whitelist  Now that the program has two different but complimentary spam filtering tools, it has become important to provide tools to prevent messages from being detected as spam. The new global whitelist capability allows you to exempt certain e-mail addresses from spam filtering, ensuring that they pass reliably into your new mail folder. More powerfully, the whitelist is configured by default to add every address to which you send mail, meaning that anyone to whom you send a message is automatically whitelisted and exempted from spam processing on your system.

Still more improvements to HTML rendering  The improvements to HTML display and editing introduced in v4.31 take another step forward in this version. Crashes from poorly-constructed HTML should now be vanishingly rare, and the quality of editing when replying or forwarding is significantly improved.

Default size and layout capabilities for folders  You can now save the size and column layout of any of your folders and use that layout as a default for all new folders. You can also apply your default layout to any existing folder at any time. These new commands are on the Folder menu when you have a folder open in its own window.

Autoreplace improvements  The message editor's Autoreplace feature now attempts to preserve the capitalization of any text it replaces for you. It also has a number of improvements dealing with international characters, and if you run the program in more than one language, each language can have its own autoreplace list.

Support for the Windows "context menu" key and Shift+F10  The program now supports keyboard access to right-click context menus in its key windows.

Simultaneous multilingual release  For the first time in the program's history, v4.41 marks the simultaneous release of Pegasus Mail in English, German, French and Italian. Proper credit is due to all the dedicated volunteers involved in each language's translation process, in particular to Sven Henze, Philippe Chartier, Emmanuel Demulau, Markus Wiedemeier and Valter Mura.

Click here to go to the downloads page and download the v4.41 installer.
 

[ Page modified 16 July 2006 | Content © David Harris  | Design by Technology Solutions ]