Pegasus Mail: E-Mail Made Easy

Sending, Receiving, and Filtering Mail

Pegasus Mail's intuitive interface makes sending and receiving mail a no-brainer. To open the program, click Start, Programs, Pegasus Mail for Win32, Pegasus Mail for Win32. When the program starts, you'll be asked to enter the Pegasus username you chose when you first set up your mail accounts.

You may want to adjust a couple of settings, such as whether to delete messages after they've been read or hear an alert sound when new mail arrives. To access these options, go to Tools, Options and configure the program to your liking. The Options menus let you configure virtually every aspect of the interface.

Quick Mail Checking

With just one click on one of the three little world-globe icons on the toolbar you can send queued mail (the icon with the blue arrow on its left), check for incoming mail (the icon with the red arrow on its right), or do both (the icon with both a red and blue arrow). You can also carry out each task individually by selecting the task from the File menu. As with other mail programs, you can also add attachments to your messages, create mail distribution lists, or ask for confirmation of delivery.

One cool feature that sets Pegasus Mail apart from other e-mail programs is that you can drag and drop e-mail addresses from old mail into a new message. To do this, click File, New Message, Standard Message, then click File, Mail Folders, select the folder you want to open, and click the Open icon. Highlight the address you want from the old e-mail and then drag it to the appropriate field in the new message window.

Filter Your Mail

Perhaps the best feature of Pegasus Mail is its easy-to-use mail-filtering system. If you want to better manage mail overload and junk mail, you can redirect messages from your mailing lists or from family and friends into predefined folders. You can also set triggers (a set of conditions that apply to a message) for certain types of mail. The best part of all is that once you define the filters, they work automatically every time you retrieve your mail.

Let's say that you're at work and you don't have the time to read e-mail from your favorite mailing list, the PC World WorldWatch. You don't want to delete the messages; you want peruse them at your leisure. Just set up a filter that identifies all of the mail from the list and move it out of the in-box to another folder.

First, you have to create a folder. To do this, select File, Mail Folders and click the New icon. Name the folder something memorable (like WorldWatch) and click OK. Indicate if you want it to be a message folder (that contains messages) or a filing tray (that contains other folders but not messages).

Next, you set up a filter that moves WorldWatch mail into its specific folder. Click Tools, Mail Filtering Rules, Edit New Mail Filtering Rules, Rules Applied When Folder Is Opened, and click the Add Rule icon (the big blue plus sign). In the Edit Rule dialog box that appears, we're going to use the Standard Header Match rule (the first choice in the pull-down menu) and enter the criteria (the word "WorldWatch") for filtering our mail. Then, we'll check all of the boxes that apply (in our example, we'll just choose Subject).

Finally, you'll have to decide on the action you want to take and select it from pull-down menu. In our case, we want to move mail into a message folder, so we'll click the Action to take drop-down menu and choose Move, then pick the WorldWatch folder we created from the list that pops up and click the Open button. A New Mail Filtering Rules dialog box will come up. Click OK to be finished.