Communications are the most important thing that we do in both our day to day business and our personal lives. With out good communications, the process of taking an ideas through design to the engineer to the CAD operator to the shop then finally to the completion of a finished product would prove to be very difficult if not impossible.

This shareware review is not set on an AutoCAD specific application, however if you think about what AutoCAD really excels at is the communication, albeit graphically, of ideas. A picture is worth a thousand words. In, and out of, the CAD department communications are an integral component of daily routine. This brings us to the shareware review for August.

Pegasus Mail is a local area network-Internet electronic mail program. As stated before, a picture is worth a thousand words and when that picture needs to be transmitted with a cover or a few extra words of instruction Pegasus Mail handles the task with poise and ease. Pegasus is a full function mail program that was designed to run on the Novell NetWare LAN, but our testing shows that it is at home in LANtastic and the Microsoft local area networks.

What makes this application so powerful is that not only will it handle mail in a LAN environment but it also will manage mail on the Internet. If your LAN is connected to the Internet, you can not only e-mail a drawing to the design team in San Francisco, you can also copy the project manager on your letter and drawing who is down the hall.. Pegasus Mail supports Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) so sending and receiving drawings in a GIF or JPEG format is not a problem.

Among many of Pegasus Mail features, the one I found very useful was what the Pegasus Mail developers call Multi-POP. What this means is that if you have several Internet e-mail addresses, even if each are on different servers, you only need to launch one session of Pegasus Mail and you can retrieve mail from each server. Pegasus also boasts filtering rules, a strong editor with spell checking, file attachment, mail merge and extensive address book.

Pegasus Mail is a 32 bit Windows 95 application. It was easy to install and set up for the local area network and the Internet and it is FREE with unlimited usage and copies. You can also obtain the Pegasus Mail software by sending them a self-addressed unstamped envelope and US$10 or equivalent, they request no checks please, to cover postage and the cost of the diskette. Send to:

Pegasus Mail, c/o David Harris
P.O. Box 5451,
Dunedin,
New Zealand

December 1996