Dad emailed to saying that David Harris has shutdown development on Pegasus Mail. This is sad on a couple of levels:
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Pegasus Mail has been around since the "beginning of the internet" and was one of the very first email clients I ever used.
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Back in 1993 when I was struggling to setup Earthlight (the first ISP in Dunedin), David was one of the few people in Dunedin to have a permanent internet connection. His generosity with his time and advice came along at a key moment for me, and for that I'm forever grateful.
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David's reasons for developing and pursuing Pegasus Mail were (and are) a wonderful example of doing what you love, and doing it for all the right reasons.
He talks a little about the history of Pegasus Mail on the website:
In 1989, the University where I worked (in Dunedin, New Zealand) installed its first Novell NetWare network. It wasn't until after we installed it that we found that it didn't include an e-mail system, but we'd already used up our budget and the commercial mail packages that were available were very expensive. To fill the gap, I wrote a simple e-mail program in my own time and made it available on the network: I was quite surprised to find that people liked it.
Early in 1990, after tidying it up a little, I made it available on the Internet at a friend's FTP site in Hawaii, expecting that four or five other sites might find a use for it... In the first week of availability, it was downloaded more than 100 times, which also surprised me. I found that I was receiving mail from people thanking me for giving them something they couldn't have afforded any other way -- communication. I grew to understand that communication had to be regarded as a right, not as a privilege: it seemed to me in 1989, as it still seems to me now, that freedom of speech is useless if nobody can hear you. Giving away Pegasus Mail seemed to be a means by which I could try to make communication more accessible to a much wider range of people who needed it - it was, if you like, my attempt to level the playing field a little, to remove some of the power from the faceless corporate giants who saw profit as the only possible end to enterprise.
Thanks David, and best wishes for whatever comes next!