Pegasus Mail and Mercury: free and made in New Zealand

I don't know if there are any Pegasus/Mercury users here but this is worth noting.

Pegasus and Mercury are a free email client and mail server (respectively), developed entirely by David Harris of Dunedin. He has been doing this full time for 15 years, living entirely off income from support and manual sales (and donations).

Back in the early days, Pegasus and Mercury were leaders in their fields, and even came bundled with Novell. Mercury is arguably still the only product that fills its particular niche. Pegasus is still known as the 'swiss army knife' of email clients, because of the many things it can do and the flexibility with which it can be configured. It focuses on security and adhering to email standards. However it's been effectively buried by other modern email clients, probably because of its old-fashioned user interface that new computer users can't get to grips with. I guess there's only a certain number of things that one man can do.

Anyway, David has called it a day. Apparently his income from Pegasus and Mercury has declined to the point where its no longer enough to live on so he's off looking for a real job.

We can only guess where Pegasus and Mercury will head now. Last year David acknowledged Open Source works so perhaps it'll be opened up to other developers.

Good luck David.