The Sylpheed-Claws Email Client [LWN.net]

Sylpheed-Claws is a branch of the Sylpheed project, a light weight email client which we explored last August on the LWN development page.

Sylpheed-Claws started as the bleeding-edge version of Sylpheed, in order to act as a testbed for new features for Sylpheed. The idea was to regularly resync with Hiroyuki's main branch, and vice-versa. Sylpheed-Claws then evolved into the stable extended version of Sylpheed, and is now an entity in its own right, mainly due to different goals and the fact that syncing both codebases doesn't happen anymore.

[Sylpheed-Claws] Sylpheed-Claws is being developed by this group of programmers. The Features document contains a lengthy list of capabilities that have been added to Sylpheed-Claws, here is a sampling of some of the more interesting additions:

A plugin mechanism.
Sorting, filtering, spell checking, and improved search capabilities.
Automatic message saving.
Font configuration.
More sophisticated color support.
Hiding of previously seen messages.
Support for IMAP over an SSH tunnel.
Extended folder properties.
An ignore thread option.
Online and offline modes.
A built-in man page.
Numerous GnuPG encryption capabilities.
SSL certificate management abilities.
Support for multiple attachments.
Import functions for Mutt and Pine address books.
LDAP dynamic query support.
Much more.

Some of the plugin extensions include: AntiVirus, HTML viewer, image viewer, MathML viewer, PGP, SpamAssassin, tool scripts and more.

The Sylpheed-Claws users manual and FAQ explain the project's features in more detail.

Version 2.0.0 of Sylpheed-Claws was announced on January 30, it includes:

A rewritten manual.
An icon legend window.
Support for printing of attached images.
Several new command line features.
GUI improvements.
A quick mail retrieval feature.
Improvements to the compose window.
Better quick search capabilities.
Support for wildcard searches in the LDAP address book.
The merging of redundant plugins.
New tool scripts.
New translations.
A long list of bug fixes.

Sylpheed-Claws shows how an open-source project such as Sylpheed can be used as a starting point for an improved application. those wishing for a more full-featured email client can use Sylpheed-claws, and the original Sylpheed project can benefit from the back porting of desired enhancements.

Source code and packages for a number of Linux distributions and other platforms are available here.

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The Sylpheed-Claws Email Client

Posted Feb 3, 2006 20:34 UTC (Fri) by mikeraz (subscriber, #155) [Link]

Previous commenter stated that claws was "snappier" than others.

The big win that keeps me with mutt is the response time. Wanna just look at Susan's emails? lsusan<enter> (l (for limit) string <enter> to you non-mutters) Need to have a threaded view? Two keystrokes and it's there. Unread mail only? Four keystrokes. Coupled with the fast execution on mutt's part one can manipulate the mailbox without disrupinting the chane of throught.

no graphical email client comes remotely close to this ease of use. Of course, if I'm wrong it would be great to hear about it.