Turnpike (software)

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Turnpike is a software suite for Microsoft Windows, originally written by Chris Hall and Richard Clayton. The suite, which comprises an email client and a news client, was acquired by Demon Internet in 1995 and supplied to their customers free of charge. It also has a small following of non-Demon users. Its advocates claim it to be it more straightforward to use and less buggy than the equivalent Microsoft product. The current version is version 6.06, and further major revision is unlikely.

The suite comprises two principal components, Connect, which interfaces with the modem driver or LAN, and Turnpike, which controls, sorts and displays mail and email. Prior to version 5 the Turnpike component was a stand-alone executable, from version 6 onwards it is implemented as a Windows Shell namespace extension. Mail filtering can be done using Unix-like regular expressions.

Versions 4 and beyond were 32-bit, and early versions of 5 included PGP.

Although no Linux versions were produced, all work satisfactorily under packages such as Win4Lin and VMware. Versions up to and including 5 also work quite well under Wine, but the display in Turnpike 6 is Windows Explorer based and has proved less easy to use in this way.

There is an active support newsgroup: demon.ip.support turnpike. In spite of its name, this is not restricted to Demon customers; it is made available to all news servers that wish to take it, and can also be found on Google groups.