Pegasus and Mercury Circling the Drain 217
Daemon Duck writes "One of the web's oldest and most respected email clients is flickering out of existence. Pegasus mail and its companion SMTP server, Mercury32, have been discontinued due to lack of funding for the ongoing development. On the website, the author David Harris states that if some funding becomes available he would consider opening the source code or continuing the development."
Why not open it now? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Why not open it now? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's very presumptious, I agree. But no more so than presuming that without funding, it will die if it's opened up.
Here's how you maintain pegasus:
1. Delete all DOS assumptions. This is best accomplished with rd/q/s pegasus
2. Download another open source mail client.
3. Profit. Or don't.
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Then again, personal email solutions are a dime a dozen. At most.
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If you need a simple smtp program for your home or office and are stuck with the windows platform, this is very nice and easy to configure. I use it for a couple of clients who fell for the sco fud, and need an smtp server on the local site.
What does funding have to do with making it open? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it so complicated? (Score:5, Insightful)
>but I fail to see the connection between open
>source and him getting paid.
1. One or more people want it to be open-sourced.
2. The author (like you, unless perhaps you are
a monk) wants money.
An exchange either will or won't happen.
If there aren't enough people in #1 above, or if they
don't want it badly enough to pay, then maybe he will
eventually give it away for free, like something that
wouldn't sell in a garage sale or on EBay.
He doesn't have to give his work away for free if
he doesn't want to.
Re:What does funding have to do with making it ope (Score:5, Insightful)
He may be considering the inevitable time investment that would come from helping people actually understand the released source. Or (though less likely), there may be IP rights involved.
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I know some people still like it, but in my mind it is certianly not worth it even if he open sourced it.
I don't blame him. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What does funding have to do with making it ope (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to use this program a long time ago. It was a very good program.
1. Holding it hostage? He wrote it so he can do with it what he wants.
2. He did a lot of work. He would like to get paid for his work so funding is important. Things like food, mortgage, health care....
So it comes down to this. He will sell his work to the community if they pay him. It is his work so he has that right. If no one wants it enough to pay for it he is going to walk a way. If you don't like it use thunderbird.
These programs have been around for a long time. I used it on a Novell V3 system for email.
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David Harris has certainly provided an excellent set of email tools for *many* years now (17?) *for free*, being supported financially by *optional* support contributions and sales of manual (any other means?)
Remembering from the 'old' days when I used to help run our dept novel server for 120+ users, his programs were better and safer than many out there for years, and has always had powerful features. (both the email clients and email server) They w
Takes some work to open source something. (Score:4, Insightful)
I finally got the source code for Post Road Mailer (native OS/2 application). Before I can start working on it, I have to build a project file for Visual SlickEdit, then linting (or is it de-lint) it, then port it over to Watcom or Gcc. There may be some legal some issues that prevent me from open sourcing it, but I hope to get it working well enough to start distributing it -- legally, free as in beer.
And I forgot. (Score:2)
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Short answer: Yes.
The compiler/interpreter/whatever used to compile/interpret/whatever the source code is utterly irrelevant.
Opening the Source (Score:3, Informative)
if sponsors could be found to provide modest ongoing funding, I would be happy to
continue developing the programs, and would even consider opening the source.
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Does it cost to open the source? It's not as simple as opening a SourceForge account and posting the source under the GPL?
Re:Opening the Source (Score:4, Insightful)
Lots of people seem to be asking this, but the question that they don't ask is this: is the source to Pegasus and Mercury 100% an original creation of David Harris? If not, he may have to pay off other authors who wrote libraries or other code written by Harris. One reason so much of the Netscape source code had to be rewritten to produce Seamonkey (and ultimately Firefox), aside from so much of it being crufty, is that there was a ton of third-party code that came from Sun and other companies.
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Nobody ever guaranteed that any particular piece of open source would compile.
Re:Opening the Source (Score:5, Informative)
In the past, I have taken a cautious "wait-and-see" approach to the idea of Open Source. I am now willing to accept that it is a valid model, and that it is producing some genuinely excellent packages (such as FireFox, of which I am inordinately fond). Ideologically, I believe that Open Source and I are a good match, and I would like to consider going that way.
There are still some major problems with the idea of going Open Source though: the most important is "How do I survive in an Open Source environment"? While Pegasus Mail and Mercury do not require a huge amount of money to develop and support, the fact remains that they *do* require a level of funding, and I am not entirely sure how this would work within an Open Source model. I feel it is significant that the majority of Open Source initiatives are either funded externally (Mozilla), or basically not funded at all (OpenLDAP, OpenSSL): it seems to me that while Open Source is an excellent technical solution to the problem of large-scale development using widely-spread teams, the area of Open Source business modeling is one that still has not been completely resolved.
The other major issue with Pegasus Mail is that it uses a proprietary third-party product as its core editor, and I would not be able to take that product with me into an Open Source environment. The same problems do not exist with Mercury, because I have written every line of the package myself, but with Pegasus Mail, the problem is significant.
So, there you have it: I am now favourably disposed to the idea of moving towards Open Source, but have to overcome some important issues before I go down that track. I am actively considering the issues and hope I can find workable solutions (such as a large, friendly, wealthy sponsor) in the not-too-distant future.
Hopefully this update to my position will reduce the amount of hate-mail I have received in the last three years from Open-Source zealots. While I understand the passion and admire the zeal of these people, I would suggest that a positive approach is always going to work better than trying to rip out my liver and feed it to the dogs. After all, this *is* my baby - I have been working on these programs and providing them free of charge for over fifteen years now, and I don't believe it's too much to ask if I expect a little basic human courtesy.
If you have suggestions and are willing to present them to me in a positive, encouraging manner, I will be happy to receive them.
David Harris
Owner/Author, Pegasus Mail and Mercury Systems,
April 20th 2005.
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You must be new here.
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hehehehheeehehhehe
Evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
One might be inclined to think Pegasus is flickering out of existance because is isn't open source. I remember early on moving from Pegasus to Eudora email because Eudora's simplicity and features were better. When Eudora became an advertisement-laden mess, the open source Thunderbird showed up to fill the gap and I haven't looked back. Now Thunderbird offers in-place spell-check and other features which were considered very advanced just a few years ago. Evolution in action.
Re:Evolution in action (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Evolution in action (Score:4, Insightful)
Now Thunderbird offers in-place spell-check and other features which were considered very advanced just a few years ago.
I can't help but express my disappointment that this is still an issue. Spellchecking should not be implemented on a per-application level. It should be implemented at an OS level and offered as a service to all applications (along with other such services). I mean sure it's nice to have spellchecking in your mail client and your word processor, but what about your chat client? What about in vi? What about in your Web browser and calendar and graphics program. More importantly, why should you have to train dictionaries for all of these programs separately? I already taught my layout program that MPLS isn't a misspelling, why should I have to do it again and again? And what about my grammar checker? Should I wait another four years until they add that to Thunderbird? What about online dictionary lookups, and thesaurus, and language translations, and bibliography references? All these things I can do today in most programs on Mac OS X, which is great, but it is high time Linux and Windows caught up. That would be evolution in action.
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The downside is that they take ages to install and don't run with computer-like efficiency.
Re:Evolution in action (Score:4, Funny)
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I, personally, don't want spellchecking in my OS, unless its a subsystem/service that can be disabled. I almost never spellcheck (not much of what I write is important enough to justify it) and I don't want to incur any operating system overhead. I just want it to make sure my applications don't crash!
That's the point of implementing these at the OS level. One chunk of code running per function rather than on per function per application. Globally disabling and installing services is easy and if you don'
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You can have that now on linux, if you stick to KDE. (I imagine you can also have it if you stick to gnome) I have my mail client, web browser, IM program, word processor etc. with working spellcheck using the same dictionaries and, internally, the same component.
The problem is this only works for KDE applications that know about the component beforehand (called Kparts) and specifically include it. As a result, sure a few integrate spell checking, but there is no way to tailor this for other functions th
Pegasus for windows (Score:2, Interesting)
what? the demise of pegasus mail? (Score:2)
well then... (Score:5, Funny)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *Pegasus community when
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *Pegasus' future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Pegasus faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Pegasus because *Pegasus is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Pegasus. As many of us are already aware, *Pegasus continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
There can no longer be any doubt: Pegasus is dying.
Re:well then... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, I've just changed jobs and got a new pair of wings
Open source them (Score:2)
They would have been long gone by now... (Score:2, Funny)
Correct me if I'm wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
Further, what would Pegasus do that thunderbird or outlook doesn't do? Would it be better money spent writing custom plugins for thunderbird?
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The free market does not give people everything they want. It doesn't give them everything they need.
What it does is efficiently distribute resources provided that certain criteria are met. It is, in effect, the most ruthless and effective system of rationing ever devised, precisely because it doesn't really care what you want or need; it only takes into account what you are willing and able to spend.
Within its scope, the free market is highy efficient. But it doesn't do a good job at th
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Well, old dinosaurs always whither... (Score:5, Informative)
Pegasus mail was great when it started. Then a Windows version emerged, with was potent, flexible and useful, despite some quirks (you could not select anything less than a line in message text -- this gave me the habit I still follow to put URLs in e-mails on a single line without unrelated text).
But it is obviously a product that evolved by slapping-on additions haphazarldy; the configuration was nothing but unified. Related features were spread accross several configuration screens amongst several configuration options, without a grand master plan.
In the end, it was a sorry kluge that was easily replaced by other clients (Eudora, Thunderbird) who eventually evolved to Pegasus' capabilities, but without the configuration nightmare.
So it arrived at it's natural end of life. It cannot compete against nimbler and swifter clients, so it now belongs in the annals of internet paleontology as a reverable footnote, much as the Great Eastern does in steamship paleontology or The Rocket in locomotive paleontology.
R.I.P. Pegasus, you won't be forgotten, but certainly not missed.
It's time to move on. Perhaps Mr Harris could bring his expertise and experience to Thunderbird, where he would be more than welcome.
A rather hasty reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
The only money he ever asked for Mercury was for a set of manuals. I never needed a set of manuals, Mercury is easy to set up and use, and of course the mailing list is a good resource. I think a Donate button in Pegasus and Mercury would have kept him much more interested. As someone on the Mercury list said, if Pegasus Mail has 1 million users and everyone donated a dollar, that would make things much more interesting. Mercury was stagnating, new versions were few and far between.
Re:A rather hasty reaction (Score:4, Interesting)
To overcome this, I think the real answer is to invest some money in advertising a newer, more advanced version of the software product. (The old one can then serve as a "lite" version, maintained simply to help keep your "brand" alive, and to introduce new people to the product's existence.) Otherwise, you can't really break free of the "development/ascent/decline" lifecycle that all products undergo.
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I'm sure I'm blinded by my primary dependence on Free software, so can you cite a few products that have had long-term success with the lite-is-free, full-is-pay model? I mean I've seen plenty try it, but over the long term I don't reca
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Other than Trillian, your list is bogus. ID Software does not in any way market their older games as free "lite" versions, and the thousand other shareware titles are exactly what I am talking about - none of them particularly successful. No one buys outlook as an express upgrade, outlook is sold to business, express is just bundled with the OS (if i
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Now our mail server runs it, our main file server runs it and our domain controller runs a network version that allows us to push it out
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To overcome this, I think the real answer is to invest some money in advertising a newer, more advanced version of the software product.
That sounds like a terrible business plan. After it has already been free as in beer and when your client base is built up of those users, you need to run with that theme. Keep it free as in beer and open source the project. Then profit in the following ways:
More details here (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/dh_upd1
By the way, I'd love to see Pegasus Mail open sourced. It's a marvelous e-mailing package. It's UI isn't the most intuitive around, but once you get used to it, it becomes a very powerful tool for your mail needs. Many years ago I evaluated a lot of e-mail softwares, including Eudora, and ended up choosing Pegasus Mail. It's really worth it.
I would surely help if a fund for purchasing and open sourcing it was established.
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"I will probably never be able to describe just how horrible it has been to be me for the last three or four years, and I certainly will not insult you now by attempting to do so; suffice it to say that anything must be better than this dubious existence. [...] I will be shutting persephone down for an indeterminite period while I try to work out whether I have a future."
That sounds to me like the guy is borderline suicidal. It's sad.
Yes, I'll miss Pegasus (Score:3, Interesting)
Each of these lacks at least a couple of must have features that I used extensively on Pmail. Thunderbird tries hard, but it always seems that the feature that I need most isn't quite finished.
Gyazmail comes close, but still has some gaping weaknesses, like the apparent inability to add addresses to the Addressbook from within the program, and a good Search function.
Ultimately Pegasus was probably best loved by those who live and breathe e-mail, and who need power and flexibility, as well as reliability. yes it was free, but it was one of those programs that I would have paid for because it suited my needs so well.
An Old Warhorse - out to pasture. (Score:2)
I was quite sad to read its being discontinued.
Dear David (Score:2)
I am sorry to see you won't be continuing the program. Open sourcing is a nice idea, but my guess is it will then become a weak Eudora or Thunderbird copy.
I wish you all the best in your future. So
BG/BSG? (Score:2)
Good Riddance (Score:2)
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Unlike Firebird and (now) Firefox.
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Exporting mail out to something else? (Score:2)
Can anyone offer any insight on exporting the masses of back emails out to some other client? (We can probably switch to Thunderbird I guess, if we can take our old emails with us)
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Cheap Noisy and Effective (Score:2)
I set my wife's biz up with Thunderbird, but there's two big areas we still use Pegasus for:
1) Quick forms, such as notifications of shipment, are impossible to do in T-bird without significant XUL programming
2) So far as I am aware, T-bird still doesn't do mailing lists where the "To" address shows as a list name, rather than listing out all the recipients
It's got its problems (command line creati
Mercury mail server (Score:2)
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Gimme $$$s (Score:2, Redundant)
While I can understand the need to eat and keep a roof over one's head while continuing to provide and improve free software, how much does it cost to simply open source the code?
He needs to open source it... (Score:2)
Life Changes. . . (Score:2)
Rulesets (Score:2)
But, yes, as time passed, Pegasus was passed in so many other areas by commercial and OSS apps that eventually about the only advantage it had were those powerful rulesets and they just did not make up for its shortcomings in other areas.
I bou
Get the spammers to pay? (Score:2)
A couple of fond memories of pmail (Score:2)
- I got my first job using pmail... I wrote a stupid script to spam a friend of mine and got the sys-admin's attention. He hired me a couple months later.
It's sad to see it go... of course I wouldn't trade Gmail or Outlook for my child's right leg so it's not too sad.
Ave atque vale (Score:2)
Thanks to David for Pegasus Mail.
Re:long time user. (Score:5, Insightful)
The post is really just an attempt to get some money. The fact that he would continue to develop it if he were paid probably goes without saying. However, he's also saying he would "consider" opening the code if he were paid enough, suggesting that if no donors come forward, he would simple delete the code and completely kill the product. This suggests to me that he's not really interested in open sourcing anything, but that he'll write that he will (if paid) in order to increase his chances of getting press on open source-centric sites like Slashdot.
Re:long time user. (Score:5, Informative)
He would have to do a lot of work to open source it since he is using a third party editor component he is offering to take it open source if he can make a living at it. I guess he could just toss the code out to the wolves after striping out the editor but it would honestly just die at that time.
There's nothing wrong with making money. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure why he wouldn't do this at least to begin with; I think it would quiet a lot of the skeptics (myself included) who aren't particularly swayed by the thought that he would "consider" making it open source given appropriate funding. Stripping out the editor but opening the rest might actually be a good way to spur development because it gives a tractable problem to some othe
Re:There's nothing wrong with making money. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should he care what you think? Honestly your post is a great example of why he would do it.
If he just released the code in a currently unusable form all that would happen is people would complain about how crappy it is. That is the problem with most free software users lately. They feel that by using a free program they are doing the authors a favor.
Frankly I just hope he hits delete. Hell he is even helping write migration tools for current users free of charge.
What a bunch of ungrateful people users are.
I hope him all the best and thank him for the gift of his time and talents.
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But what I'm suggesting is that it's not clear where he's going to get any funding from. He could probably pick up some donations from the OSS community, but I doubt anyone is going to send him anything if it appears that he's keeping th
Gratis vs. Libre (Score:4, Insightful)
Which kind of demonstrate why I prefer to use free software vs. merely gratis software. Free software will live on as long as their is an interest, while merely gratis software depend solely on the owners ability to find a way to justify continuing the work on it.
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Why?
I have no idea why he is shunting down but stated that he is have some money problems. You also don't know what is happening in his life that forced him to stop this free development.
So you have gotten years of use out of this program and you paid how much? He is offering continued support to those that h
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Did you read the post on the website?
The author is having problems paying the bills. If someone would step up and help him pay his bills he will keep working on the program. If that group wants him to open source he would consider it.
I see nothing mercenary about it.
Simple question. Did you buy a manual or subscription?
If not frankly I find the comment that you wish you could get the latest and greatest to be a bit mercenary. Not a thank you or good work I am sorry t
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Open Letter to David Harris (Score:3, Interesting)
If you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll explain why I think you should probably Open Source these products. Not because it's good for the world, but because it's good for YOU. (I do think your creations have been good for the world
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Re:long time user. (Score:4, Informative)
> keep up with competitors. Nearly everyone has already switched over to Thunderbird
> or something else
Failed to keep up? You're out of your chair.
If you compare Pegasus and Thunderbird side-by-side, Thunderbird looks positively feature-impoverished. If people have switched from Pegasus to Thunderbird, it is because they were no longer willing to be tied down to MS Windows. Running on other operating systems is the *one* meaningful feature Thunderbird possesses that Pegasus does not.
Going the other way, there are many downsides to Thunderbird, the most significant being that its filtering is nowhere near the same ballpark with Pegasus Mail's filtering. It doesn't have flow control. It can't filter based on status flags like has-been-read, has-been-answered, or cetera. It can't filter based on time elapsed since receipt (e.g., leave unread messages in the inbox for up to ten days, then move them to another folder based on these rules...). It can't highlight a message so that it shows up a different color in the list. It can't form-reply. It can't launch an external process to handle certain messages. Et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad bedlam.
Besides the filtering, there are a number of other useful features missing from Thunderbird too, but that one is really the biggie. If your mailreader can't presort your mail for you, whatever else it's going to do to save you time is going to pale by comparison.
Heck, even *Gnus* (the mailreader that has every feature *including* the kitchen sink, and a learning curve to match) is missing some of Pegasus Mail's more useful features, features that Pegasus Mail has had since 1996.
Pegasus Mail didn't fail to keep up, in terms of development or features. What happened is two things:
First, and most important, it failed to be ported to the operating systems that are used by power users who crave powerful software with powerful features. A great many former Pegasus Mail users no longer use Windows. Wine didn't mature fast enough, and users were forced to find other mailreaders that would run on the OS they wanted to use. Choice of mailreader, even a really great mailreader, was not a strong enough factor to drive the choice of operating systems.
Second, it lost the end-user market when operating system makers started bundling cheesy half-baked mailreaders with the OS. But it shares that trait with most other mailreaders, except for the bundled ones and the ones that were never aiming for the end-user market in the first place (e.g., Gnus).
I understand why *development* of Pegasus Mail has stopped, in the absense of funds. But it would be nice if it could continue to be distributed for another couple of years. It's still quite a good ways ahead of the dev curve. Thunderbird will catch up with it in time, but based on its progress to date it could be another five or ten years.
Meanwhile, I'm now stuck with no decent option to recommend to people who don't want to fight a learning curve (to adopt e.g. Gnus) and aren't satisified with Yet Another Lame Outlook Clone (e.g., Thunderbird).
If bandwidth costs are the problem, he could have just given permission for others to distribute the unchanged binaries.
I suspect what's really going on is that he hopes somebody offers to buy the source. Frankly, I hope so too. I've been hoping so for a while. If someone were to manage to port it to *nix/X11, I'd be a very happy man.
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I guess he means 'if I can't make money by open sourcing it, no-one else will'.
It would be a real shame if he just destroyed the code. Even if it failed to get a new following as open source, I'm sure there must be something in there that other projects can use.
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It hasn't been important since Eudora was freed, and it's been totally, utterly, and completely irrelevant to all but DOS users (no idea if pmail for dos is even still around) since Thunderbird came out and made Eudora irrelevant.
pmail was highly useful back in the DOS days as it was the only free-as-in-beer client to come with a GREAT DEAL of functionality. A lot of Novell/DOS shops used it for just this reason; it even played well with Netware.
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Re:Never heard of it (Score:5, Informative)
So far as opening the source goes, I'd love to see it happen (actually, I'd love to see someone hire him to run it as an open-source project), but I don't know how dynamic a community could be forged around a Win32 codebase that I understand to be optimized for performance and minimum resource use over modularity, portability, and ease of future development.
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I always wondered what became of Pegasus mail, guess I know now.
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A dying breed.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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I haven't found a conversion utility which does a better job than that.
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You misunderstand. (Perhaps I wasn't clear in my original post, so I'll attempt to clarify.)
The group in which I worked provide core computing services for the entire university; that is, we made <user@example.edu> email addresses work. We did not use Mercury Mail; we used Solaris machines running sendmail and AMDS. The core mail infrastructure had to handle 30,000+ users, and had to be available 24x7x365, because it was what most people used.
Some departments deployed their own mail system