What's it going to be? MH or Pegasus?
Gregory B. Newby
Internet Exploration Sample
This review should help expert email users to decide
between using the MH mail system or the Pegasus mail system. Although
many other systems are available, these are of interest because Pegasus
is representative of many similar PC-based mail clients that understand
POP, while MH is the "king" of Unix-based email systems. So, the
basic question this review approaches is, "is
it better to use the (questionably) very best Unix-based system, or an
average PC-based system?"For
this review, an "expert" email user is someone as who gets lots of mail,
and who, each day:
-
Needs to respond personally to many messages
-
Needs to initiate many messages
-
Often needs to look through old messages to find
a record of an email transaction
-
Subscribes to mailing lists and other sources of
email that needs to be scanned quickly then discarded
Pegasus is not really directed at expert users.
Instead, it's intended more for mainstream PC owners who want to use a
POP server to read & store their mail on their PC. The Web site
for Pegasus is at http://www.pegasus.usa.com/,
and clearly describes the program. It's available for many different
types of computers. One of the main features that distinguishes Pegasus
from other PC-based mailers such as Eudora,
Siren and Netscape's
mail is that it's entirely freeware: free for all people in all organizations
for all purposes. They do mention that they won't give techical support
(which is also free) to spammers, but that's about the only restriction.
MH is short for message handler, and is based
on a system developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1980s. MH was
taken over by Berkeley University, but languished. Today, there's
a new version called "nmh" (for New MH). It's available at a variety
of software sites, including ftp://uiarchive.uiuc.edu/pub/packages/mail/nmh/.
The main developer today is Richard
Coleman at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This review was
based on nmh, but will refer to it generically as MH.
The features I considered most relevant for expert
email users, and a comparison between Pegasus and MH, are as follows.
The bluer fonts are for cold (or, "bad") and the redder fonts are for hot
(or "good").
Ease of installation
-
Pegasus took only a
few seconds to install after I downloaded the 1.2M file. A few simple
questions were asked. This is something a non-expert would find easy,
although there is a bit of lingo that's confusing (for example, you are
prompted during installation whether you will use a NetWare server.
Do non-experts know the answer to this?)
-
MH took about 1/2 hour
to install and required fairly detailed system skills to choose options
and compile the software. It was still fairly smooth, but required
a some Unix expertise. By default, special system privileges would
have been required, but I made some small modifications to the configuration
script to install MH in my own personal directory on Ruby.
Protocols supported
-
Pegasus knows how to
speak POP. IMAP isn't supported.
-
MH uses the Unix sendmail
program directly. This is usually good, but MH isn't too flexible
when there are sendmail problems (for example, on a busy system mail sometimes
gets backed up, but this isn't usually evident to users. Because
MH waits for sendmail to actually finish, instead of just queing a message,
you sometimes need to wait for it).
Search capabilities
-
Pegasus has a "find"
window that searches through a current message, but doesn't seem to be
able to search through all messages for a particular address or text string.
-
MH has a command called
"pick" that looks
through any mail folder you specify for any string, in any message part.
You can look just through the From:
header, through the whole message body, or whatever choose. For any
range of messages. You can also build up sort of a database by using
Unix symbolic links to cross-file your messages (keep one message in multiple
folders). The linking is done automatically with a command like refile
cur +a +inls80 (which would put the current
message in two folders -- but really it's just one file, with a link between
them!).
Filtering
-
Pegasus has fully-functional
filtering rules so that you can route particular mesages to particular
locations, play sounds, delete messages automatically, etc.
-
MH can filter based
on the "pick"
command, but doesn't have any automatic filtering capability. If
you wanted this, you'd need to write your own MH commands or Unix scripts
to do it. Or, you could use separate filtering software such
as Procmail.
Scanning
-
Pegasus keeps messages
in separate folders. You can view the folders then double-click a
message to view it. For the inbox (new mail), you basically need
to set up filter rules if you want to do anything other than view all the
new message headers. In other words, every non-filtered message you
receive will appear in your inbox.
-
MH also keeps messages
in separate folders and has a "scan"
command to view headers. But you can use the "pick" command to decide
which messages to scan: pick -from
virtu-l -nolist ; scan picked would let
you view only the headers with virtu-l in the From:
header. This gives an effective
way to quickly scan through messages by content without an explicit filter.
Also, you can remove messages in bulk without needing to select each one
with a mouse, as with Pegasus: pick
-from answerme.com -nolist ; rmm picked.
Which mail system to choose is not clear from an
analysis of the features. The more important questions are perhaps
those of the style of reading for a particular expert: Does she tend
to let messages pile up? If so, the "pick" features of MH could be
a real winning feature. But if she reads mail many times per day,
then the easier typing and point-and-click interface of Pegasus could make
life easier -- as long as the ability to search archives for particular
messages isn't too important. Although there is an X-Windows version
of MH which could display on a PC screen, it's a fairly unattractive interface
and would probably leave one pining for Pegasus.
Based on my own experience, anything up to a few
dozen messages per day is tolerable without the features of MH. Beyond
that, it starts to make sense to use the powers of Unix to develop some
customizations for MH that will save time and effort.
Updated 2/9/99 by Gregory
B. Newby