mguhlin

Bare Bones Email Program

One of my favorite email programs, Mozilla Thunderbird, takes up about 1.5 gigs on my hard drive. That’s not that much, really, but what if I had a smaller alternative program? Small is beautiful, they say, and I have to admit that I’m always on the lookout for smaller stuff. 

It’s probably that deep seated desire to streamline and get rid of the unnecessary, the drive for a minimalistic lifestyle. I guess, if that was true, I might not be spending so much on Amazon or streaming services. The search continues for the perfect replacement that takes up less space, uses less resources.

Source: Small is Beautiful, Hannah’s Pictures
With that quest in mind, I may have finally found an alternative to Mozilla Thunderbird. As an old time POP3/SMTP/IMAP email program user (e.g. Eudora Lite), I simply need an email program to shuttle messages from one IMAP account to another.
Mozilla Thunderbird works, but takes up 1.5 gigs on my Windows machine. What could I use instead? Today, I ran into an old copy of an email program I thought was defunct.

That email program is Pegasus Mail. Believe it or not, I actually used Pegasus Mail MANY years ago, perhaps as far back as mid to late 1990s. It was a shock to run into this old program, one I had abandoned in favor of other tools like Calypso Mail, Eudora Lite, and other email clients.
You can find anything on the web, I guess, and Pegasus Mail is one of those…
Welcome to the home of Pegasus Mail, the Internet’s longest-serving PC e-mail system, and of the Mercury Mail Transport System, our full-featured Internet Mail Server.
Pegasus Mail is a free product, dedicated to serving all who need it, whilst Mercury is a modestly-priced commercial system that allows free use for private and non-profit users.

Now, installed on my machine, using IMAP to interact with 4 different email accounts (e.g. two personal Google accounts, one Google Workspace for Education, and one ProtonMail via ProtonBridge), Pegasus Mail takes up hardly any space.

Wondering how much? 45 megs.

Wow. One benefit is that you can copy the folder (PMAIL) from your C:\ root onto a USB drive, make a few edits, and voila, you now have a portable email program that is 45 megs in size and doesn’t choke every time you run it (which Thunderbird would do, making it impractical even with the PortableApps version).

I have to admit it was a bit much to setup, but the Help files are detailed and easy to follow.

Update: Another email program I played with, that doesn’t support HTML like Pegasus Mail, is Sylpheed. I’ve dabbled with Sylpheed before, so set up wasn’t difficult. It only takes up 30 megs. But be aware that you won’t be able to write rich text format messages or HTML. It’s bare bones text. 

Of course, for the purposes of this blog entry, that’s not a bad thing.

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure

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