If, like me, you use IMAP instead of POP for your mail, you may have experienced some difficulty with the popular email clients (kmail, evolution, thunderbird). And you may also have had difficulty with the lack of customization, or poor spam filtering, or lack of features of some of these email clients. You may even have experimented with mutt, which is a wonderful email client but which works from the command line only.
Sylpheed, a lesser-known email client (given its features, I can't figure out how it remains so obscure), is like mutt for the desktop: a gtk application with outstanding functionality and features.
If you want to try it out, here's how you go about getting the most recent version and all the fancy extras:
1. Open a terminal. Download and register the signing key for the sylpheed sources:
Code:
wget http://colino.net/colin.publickey
sudo apt-key add colin.publickey
2. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list to include the sylpheed sources (you can use gedit or any text application for this; I will use nano here, since we're already in the terminal):
Code:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
Go to the end of the file (page down a few times) and add this:
Code:
#Sylpheed sources
deb http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/ubuntu/dapper/ ./
Save the file (ctl-o), and exit nano (ctl-x).
3. Then update your sources:
Code:
sudo apt-get update
4. Install sylpheed:
Code:
sudo apt-get install sylpheed-claws-gtk2
This will pull down whatever is necessary to install the basic application.
5. Install extras. Sylpheed has very many extensions and plugins. Take a look at them all by doing this:
Code:
sudo apt-cache search sylpheed-claws-gtk2
Take a look at this list (note the spamassassin plugin, the trayicon plugin, the html viewer, etc.). You can get quite a few of the plugins by installing the plugins packages:
Code:
sudo apt-get install sylpheed-claws-gtk2-plugins sylpheed-claws-gtk2-extra-plugins
Or, you can get them individually, by specifying them on the apt-get command line, eg:
Code:
sudo apt-get install sylpheed-claws-gtk2-spamassassin
6. Open sylpheed. You will find it (in gnome) under Applications --> Internet --> Sylpheed Claws gtk2
Spend a few minutes looking around and setting things up. If you like, you can customize the interface (as well as many other things) to use various themes. I use the tango theme (TangoClaws). The complete list is here:
http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/themes.php
To use a theme, download it, unpack it, and navigate to the unpacked directory in sylpheed under Configuration --> Preferences --> Themes. Install the theme, then select "Use this".
You may also be interested in various scripts for use with sylpheed (address conversion etc.):
http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/tools.php
The feature set of sylpheed is very rich, flexible, and functional. You might find that it becomes a little addictive...
Enjoy.
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