10 ms·

Sylpheed – a simple, lightweight but featureful e-mail client

172 points by generic_user 9y ago

dfox 9y ago
For last few years (after geting bitten by yet another breakage when upgrading evolution) I'm using claws-mail which is fork of sylpheed and it does everything I need from email client (and in contrast to evolution it even has usable windows version).
- generic_user 9y ago
  I have about the same experience, but with Thunderbird. Once I got my accounts set up in Sylpheed/Claws (I have used both) I found it did everything I needed, Its extremely stable has minimal dependency and uses negligible CPU and memory. I can compile Sylpheed form sources it in a few minutes on any recent version of Linux or BSD with little or no dependencies.
SwellJoe 9y ago
The screenshots on the page don't really do it justice. I mean, it's not the most beautiful email client in the world, but it doesn't look like 2001. Because it uses GTK it looks like the rest of your desktop (assuming your desktop is GNOME). I always end up going back to Thunderbird, for a variety of reasons. But, I try a bunch of other stuff every now and then. Sylpheed is not bad, but it's not got anything I don't get from Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is more actively maintained and has more capabilities. (I keep trying Evolution, and hating it, every single time. It's huge and thinks really hard about every single action and continues to be buggy. I don't know how something has been in really active development for decades and still has weird quirks and misbehavior without any actionable error messages.)
- madez 9y ago
  I also have made bad experiences with evolution. I wonder why major distributions still use it as their default client. Is there some good reason for that, or is it just neglect?
  - Faaak 9y ago
    I'm forced at work to use an exchange account (so that implies using the calendar). Evolution was the only program I found that works on ubuntu and supports exchange somewhat (I didn't want at all to use the exchange web interface). So yeah, its a bit buggy, but it works for me
    - vetinari 9y ago
      If you don't mind having jre on your system and running a daemon: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ Then you can use any client you want.
      - nekitamo 9y ago
        Have you managed to get davmail working with Office365/Outlook.com? It was unusably slow every time I tried (message fetching would take over a minute, inbox refresh would only happen once every ~30 minutes, etc...)
        vetinari 9y ago
        No, fortunately, never had to.
  - natermer 9y ago
    Because it's the email client that supports Exchange the best and related calendar/email features have been split off into daemons that provide things like email messaging and calendar notifications that integrate into the desktop. The reality is that all desktop email clients suck and suffer from neglect. Mostly because hard-core people are using things like mutt or emacs for mail and everybody else is using webmail. The reality is that IMAP effectively failed as a standard. The idea of 'mail folders' is somewhat of a improvement over the mbox format, but there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers. There are a few aborted attempts and ways to program mail filtering, of course, but nothing that really works well or isn't confusing as hell for normal people. Webmail effectively started off as browser-based IMAP clients, but they have progressed far far beyond that and solved most of the issues with syncing email to desktops, laptops, and phones. Probably the answer to fixing this issue is going back to simple POP protocol and then using something like Notmuch to use 'search-like' features to logically group email into folders and such things without destructively editing emails like IMAP does. By this I mean with IMAP and maildir you are editing and moving files around on a remote file system and this means that if something goes wrong the mail gets duplicated or corrupted or out of order or whatever. By using a database-type approach with notmuch you are not touching the original emails for the most part, but simply editing and modifying metadata. The original structure and such are preserved.
- educar 9y ago
  I thought thunderbird was not actively maintained? This is great if that is the case.
  - hackuser 9y ago
    That was the last I heard too, but it seems to be actively updated. For example, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ Does anyone know the story?
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      There have been a couple of discussions here and elsewhere about it. My understanding is that Thunderbird is no longer a priority project for Mozilla Foundation and has no full-time developers paid by Mozilla, but it still uses Mozilla resources, and a number of volunteers continue to maintain it. So, it's kinda in the category of Sylpheed or Claws, in that it no longer has major corporate sponsors, I guess. I think Evolution has a bit more corporate sponsorship (Red Hat, which has developers working full-time on it, while SuSE stopped funding its development a while back; I don't think Canonical contributes in any significant way, either), so if having a corporate developer behind the mail client is necessary, I guess Evolution is the only choice for Linux users. Frankly, I wish Red Hat, and everybody else, would put its people on Thunderbird. It's far from perfect, but it's farther from awful than Evolution. But, I don't need Exchange integration, so I may be missing the big picture for corporate users.
      - fabrice_d 9y ago
        The Thunderbird community is quite active, as can be seen by the activity in the tb-planning mailing list (https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/ https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/). They know they have to pivot to a more modern codebase, and have been discussing modernizing TB on a regular basis. Most of the traffic in April is about a "Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies". Go read it!
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message. Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier. Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc. Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. [1] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/
  - lysium 9y ago
    Thunderbird allows editing the From header. I think this was a recent change from last year. I deleted my huge identity list.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    Thunderbird is slow, I agree. But, it has some tools that make it easier for me to manage my huge volume of mail; plugins for auto-archiving, etc. The quick search feature is almost usable (compared to completely useless on most mail clients), which I guess is where the "indexing its bits" time is going to. It is a reasonable trade off for me, for now. I've never really loved a mail client, so saying I prefer Thunderbird is somewhat faint praise. Actually, maybe I love GMail (which is interesting, because making a web app that beats a native app is incredibly hard).
  - derf_ 9y ago
    > Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. I tried running claws-mail on my old N900. Just opening my basic IMAP inbox with 20,000 messages in it exhausted the memory of the device. I have some folders with 200,000 messages. This was a while ago, so things may have improved, since. The only client I've ever successfully run on such low-memory systems is webmail, or something like the Android mail client, which simply doesn't bother to look at more than a few hundred messages. The UX in both cases is abysmal, but they provide some functionality, which is a step up. I may not be a typical e-mail user.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Assuming the desktop is GNOME is a bold assumption, AFAIK there's no gnome under OSX nor windows, and personally GNOME has displayed so much bad faith and disdain for the need of its users that even if it were the best desktop available I would not touch it with a 10 foot stick. Also GTK applications usually do not look bad under KDE or LXDE or cinnamon, etc. That being said the official screenshots are horribly dated, maybe more than 10 years. They feature version 2.2 while current version is 3.5.1 better than words here a screenshot of sylpheed 3.5.1 under a plasma 5 desktop: https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png I tried a variety of email client and none have been fully satisfying, evolution was really painful to use and half-broken most of the time, it's been a while since I've used thunderbird and though it tends to work I have no plan to go back until it offers the possibility to prevent access with a password as the mozilla suite offered. Mutt was nice but I moved away for personal preferences. Right now I use kmail which I recommend you do NOT use, far from being the pain evolution was, it mostly work most of the time but when it does not you're in for a ride, the main drawback is the akonadi backend that offers nothing I want or need and gives me headache. every other day I have stop and restart akonadi so the new mails would show in my inbox, once in a while it fails silently to send email, the documentation is sparse and the bug reports are scary[1] and the fix you may finally find are not obvious[2]. I had hopes in trojita but last time I checked it was still not ready for daily use after years of development. I had even better hopes for caliopen[3] but current roadmap says late 2018. The good news is KDE has been working on replacing akonadi by Sink which is supposed to have learned from their mistakes and address the weak points of akonadi , and replacing kmail with kube which will leverage Sink and be consistent with roundcube next. Bad news is they've been at it for a couple years now and it's not done yet. Next in line for me to give a try are elementary OS' mail[4] and notmuch in emacs (also exists for vim). [1]: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cbug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&product=kmail2&query_format=advanced&resolution=--- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=cha... [2]: http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidates-error-and-how-to-fix-it/ http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidate... [3]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/ https://www.caliopen.org/en/ [4]: https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail
- sigzero 9y ago
  Those screenshots should really be updated.
mintplant 9y ago
As a point of comparison: why should I switch from Thunderbird to Sylpheed?
- generic_user 9y ago
  I used Thunderbird for a long time and then switched to Sylpheed. For one its about as good an email client as Thunderbird. That's all I really used TB for. If I want to use a calendar TB is not my first choice. I would rather use something along the lines of a project manager that has gnatt charts etc. So for email Sylpheed is elegant and lightweight and focused. I check my inbox and get my mail done then close it down and get back to what I was working on. Where as with TB I constantly had it open in the background and ended up messing with calendar and to-do more or less procrastinating.
- fnj 9y ago
  Why switch? I'll tell you why I switched from Thunderbird to Claws. I got sick of Thunderbird's pathological memory leaking. I start by email client when I log in and leave it running indefinitely (days-weeks). Thunderbird continually started out at 1 GB but grew over time without limit, even if only sitting idle, collecting mail. After a couple of days it would be creeping north of 6 GB. Several times it drove my PC into pathological swapping, making the PC impossible to use and extremely difficult even to get control of to shut down. Claws is currently using 0.1 GB, even after running for a week.
  - chengiz 9y ago
    Thunderbird user for over a decade here, on both Linux and Windows, and have not seen this happen, ever. Firefox, I'd agree and it still does on Linux. Never had a problem with Thunderbird other than the disappearing Outlook calendars.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Super fast and lightweight. That's what I liked about it.
soufron 9y ago
I've used Sylpheed for years and I miss it. I stopped using it because I switched to OSX at some point. But it's a beautiful piece of software.
- rmind 9y ago
  brew install sylpheed It is compiled and linked using the native X libraries on OS X, so it looks quite decent. There are versions using XQuartz, but I have had problems with the font rendering.
yeahGreat 9y ago
Not to be confused with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed
sigi45 9y ago
Wow its ugly. While people might or not might trust google etc. The spam filter and the ui from gmail is just to good to switch to any offline client. I'm only using thunderbird for pgp mails.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > The spam filter ... is just to good to switch to any offline client. Your Gmail account is available over POP3 and IMAP. That means you enjoy the same spam filtering regardless of whether your use Gmail in your web browser or a dedicated e-mail client like Sylpheed.
  - generic_user 9y ago
    It makes me think that these people have never used an offline email client and don't understand what pop and imap are.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      Most of the gmail users I know are a bit clueless and lacking in the technical domain and don't understand what an email client is because they've only ever used webmails. So I would not be surprised if they were unaware of pop and imap.
    - sigi45 9y ago
      First email client was outlook express, than thunderbird, than gmail. I tried mutt, i tried others. I'm not syncing my mails anymore i just get an pop up from my webbrowser that a new email is here. I also use different computers (home desktop, home laptop, work desktop) and prefer the same ui with the same settings on all pcs. The browser became in some way, my operating system for mails.
    - flukus 9y ago
      Is it that surprising? Webmail has existed for longer than most people have had email and it's not tied to a job or ISP like the previous most popular options were.
uzoodoo 9y ago
How does it compare with Claws Mail [0]? I've always assumed Claws is the more full-featured fork of Sylpheed, but seeing that they've diverged over a decade ago and are both still in development I'm curious how they compare. [0] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#What_are_the_differences_between_Claws_Mail_and_Sylpheed.3F http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#... Back in 2001 Claws Mail (formerly 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. Claws Mail then evolved into the stable, extended version of Sylpheed, and in 2006 became an entity in its own right, in part due to different goals and the fact that syncing both codebases stopped happening. Claws Mail has many extra features compared to Sylpheed and is more powerful, yet is just as fast, lightweight and stable.
  - uzoodoo 9y ago
    Well, considering that was written a decade ago, it doesn't really answer my question... http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Information&type=revision&diff=3029&oldid=1817 http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Inform...
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  I'm looking at the screenshots there and getting shuddering flashbacks to when I used to use Linux as my full-time desktop environment. The composition window which "helpfully" provides a breakdown of "Headers", "Attachments", and "Other" tabs. The preferences panel which thinks customizing the date format -- using strftime format strings -- is something that needs a preference...
  - Yetanfou 9y ago
    You can get the same preference-laden programs for MacOS (which, for some reason, I assume you now use) and Windows, this is not a Linux-thing. Linux users who want to have things decided for them can use Gnome [1] or Unity [2], no such 'superfluous' preferences or extraneous tabs there. Linux does not equate complexity, nor does MacOS or Windows equate sane defaults and simplicity (iTunes comes to mind as an anti-example). The fact that these programs persist for such a long time indicates that there are people who prefer to make their own choices, no matter how superfluous these might seem in others eyes. [1] https://www.gnome.org/ https://www.gnome.org/ look ma, no preferences... [2] https://unity.ubuntu.com/ https://unity.ubuntu.com/ look ma, no future...
darklajid 9y ago
Trojita is my client of choice so far, I might have to reevaluate that again?
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  Trojita is a really well written client. Fastest GUI based email client I've used, easily. They're still lacking on full PGP support though so I'm sticking to mutt for now.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  IIANM Trojita is limited to a single imap account which makes it almost useless to me, as I would have to have an additional email client for the other accounts. Last time I checked trojita was still a work in progress with missing features and was not ready for production and daily use. Is it ready now ?
  - ac29 9y ago
    I like trojita and used it for several months recently. It does a lot right, but the biggest reason I stopped using it is a lack of an address book, or some other form of email address autocomplete. Having to lookup old emails to figure out someones email address is just a deal breaker -- especially because the search isn't all that great either.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Jan is one of the most active client authors on the standards lists. He really cares about getting the details right. It's nice to see!
screed 9y ago
last version for macOS 18 Apr 2014
hexmiles 9y ago
slighty off topic, but there are mail client that support at-rest encryption? For varius reason i need to run a mail client from a usb key, and i could't find a client that support the ability to encrypt the mailbox (also with addressbook and for windows). Veracrypt and similar solution are not applicable in my case.
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  If your client supports PGP, you can always implement something like: https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incomi...
  - hexmiles 9y ago
    i will look into that, it seem a step-up from my current setup. Thanks
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  I remember something called tutanota or totanuta that advertised itself as encrypting the data on the device itself (phone, tablet, computer,...).
  - ComodoHacker 9y ago
    https://tutanota.com/ https://tutanota.com/ is an email service with end-to-end encryption. It has web UI and doesn't store data on the device.
    - hexmiles 9y ago
      Unfortunaly i need the mail to be stored on the device since i need to be able to access them even offline.
- ComodoHacker 9y ago
  Why container encryption is not suitable for you? If security of the host is a concern, you have to trust the host with any mail client anyway.
popey456963 9y ago
Must admit I am somewhat jaded with current mail applications and actually creating my own. Sylpheed is wonderful and the one I currently use, it's fast and works. My problem is with the GUI. Every single linked email client in this thread looks like it has come from 2005 and, unsurprisingly, most of them were created around then. Hoping that maybe by using some more modern libraries, and aiming for a material design-esque client, I might be able to make something easy to use and reliable.
- benjie_homer 9y ago
  Is it open source and are you looking for contributors? If I can help, I'll contribute.
  - popey456963 9y ago
    Honoured to have your first post Benjie. It is open-source and made in Electron, but I'm not sure it's upto much at the moment. I've mostly been working on getting IMAP and SMTP setup as opposed to any graphical work. If you're interested in helping out, I'd love any help I can get. Email me at the address on my profile page and I can give you some more details. The current design looks as follows: https://puu.sh/vmtT6/b803a88da5.png https://puu.sh/vmtT6/b803a88da5.png
- sidep 9y ago
  I used Evolution for years and was surprised at how much faster Sylpheed is. The problem with email isn't only the GUI though.
- stevekemp 9y ago
  I wrote a mail-client, mine is console based with lua-scripting. I figured, when I started, that the task was simple, there are MIME-libraries, etc, out there, so to create a simple mail-client I only had to write three things: * A view of all maildirs/folders. * An index-view to show the contents of a maildir/folder. * A view of a single message. How naive I was. Broken email is everywhere. Things like IMAP support, GPG-support, and similar took months to get done. That moment when you're checking email in your spam-folder and your mail-client crashes? That happened far too often. Writing a mail client isn't hard, but it is fiddly, and you don't realize it until you think you're done. (UTF-handling, malformed MIME-messages, etc etc.) In the most sincere way possible: good luck!
dim13 9y ago
Does it still misses RFC 2177?
- popey456963 9y ago
  Pretty sure most applications don't need to support RFC 2177 to still be efficient. Long-polling for most IMAP servers requires one packet every nine minutes (to the best of my knowledge), which is literally nothing. It would take months of being run constantly to even get up to a megabyte of data being transferred. Some rough back of the envelope calculations: - 10 minutes per poll, 1440 minutes in a day, 144 packets per day. - 50 bytes per packet, 1,000,000 bytes to a megabyte, 20,000 packets required. - Roughly 140 days of time, or 5 months to reach a single megabyte. Aren't there some optimisations that are so minuscule it isn't worth implementing them?
  - kwhitefoot 9y ago
    Of course but it so satisfying to reduce the overhead further. The struggle to reduce a megabyte of overhead by half a megabyte is great while knocking half a megabyte off a gigabyte is often trivial. I'm not arguing that anyone should try shaving the megabyte of course.
Fice 9y ago
I used Sylpheed a lot in the past. Very fast, clean, simple and reliable. But switched to Notmuch (with Emacs UI) years ago for its great flexibility and programmability, and due to my general preference for using Emacs modes over separate applications.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  I'm considering switching to notmuch in emacs, is there any advice or specific thing I should know beforehand ?
  - ymse 9y ago
    Know that all other mail clients will feel inadequate ever after. If you are forced to use something else at work, you might quit and end up homeless.
morimoritokyo 9y ago
Sylpheed is my all-time favorite e-mail app. In late 2001 I brought a Vaio C1 [1] back from Japan. 192 MB ram, Transmeta Crusoe processor that could burst to 600 MHz. Running Windows ME _everything_ was slow out of the box, but with Linux (Slackware), a minimal window manager (forget if it was XFCE, Enlightenment, or something else), and Sylpheed it just flew. Even with huge numbers of messages everything was snappy. It was amazing. I switched from Linux to Mac in 2009 and migrated to Mail.app at the time. It's not terrible, but even on recent hardware it feels more sluggish than Sylpheed did on that underpowered ultraportable in 2001. Good to see that it's still getting occasional updates 16 years later. 1. http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1VSX/ http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1VSX/
- rntksi 9y ago
  With MacOS, I particularly love MailMate. It's been with me for years, and I love how it handles the flow of editing mail messages. You take care of the contents, it takes care of formatting. If you've ever tried LaTeX, it's a similar concept.
  - h1d 9y ago
    Used mailmate when Mail.app was slightly buggy some years ago but then got tired of mailmate being buggy as well (iirc, takes seconds selecting multiple mails, changes column width after showing mail folders on/off, message signature inserting unnecessary new line and crashes randomly and never had those fixed in a year or something), I switched back to Mail.app in Sierra, seems responsive and trouble free so far.
- zomg 9y ago
  i've been using spark on all my apple devices and i love it. reminds me of sparrow, before google gobbled them up. https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/
- w8rbt 9y ago
  I used Sylpheed in 2001 for awhile before moving mostly to mutt. Recently, I found my old Sylpheed mail folders. 16 years later Sylpheed reads those mail folders and works just like it did back in the day. Still very fast and responsive too.
krick 9y ago
Not unlike many others, I use Thunderbird and sometimes think about switching to something else (main reasons are speed and usability). But I guess what many of us need much more than better email client is better email workflow. I have dozens of filters and always keep my inbox empty, and yet I think may be the real thing is I don't really manage my emails properly. Maybe I just need to set up this filter to delete stuff instead of moving it (I'm not really keen on deleting stuff in general, always feels unsafe and shortsighted), maybe I need some other system. By the way, using Gmail web-interface (and Gmail is not the only mail provider I use) feels almost as unsatisfactory, as Thunderbird: ok, filters and search are a bit better, and it physically cannot hung-up my whole system under load, but otherwise it is as needy and clumsy as Thunderbird. I remember receiving several thousands of emails overnight because of some programmers mistake, and deleting it was quite painful: I'd gladly tell Gmail "just delete all this stuff" (by filter), but I didn't find any way to do so, I had to fall back to slowly manually deleting my mail by 200-item batches. Would be interesting to hear how other people manage their mailboxes.
fabiofzero 9y ago
Wow, this brings back memories! I used Syplheed Claws when I was still running Mandrake - before it was merged and became Mandriva.
drvortex 9y ago
I cannot understand the relevance of an email client, now that browsers can do email. It may be my workflow, so I will ask: Is there any scenario where an email client would be necessary - i.e. a browser based solution will not work?
- icemelt8 9y ago
  If you have an email address that is not gmail, which browser email client will you use?
- r3bl 9y ago
  > Is there any scenario where an email client would be necessary - i.e. a browser based solution will not work? Here's one: multiple email accounts that you need to check on a regular basis. I would lose my mind if I had to track my emails across three different web interfaces.
vanous 9y ago
HTML vs plaintext The plaintext email only nature resonated with me for long time but many email and chat services have gone rich text and it's great. Why I say that...I used to use claws mail for many years for business email but being able to at least make text bold or add an inline image is valuable. For personal email mutt is great for me and Gmail too nowadays but for business to business, HTML is required. It took me a while to get Thunderbird to mimick Claws. Thunderbird is much slower and crashing randomly frequently but is the best from the crowd. Does Claws Mail allow me to write HTML styled messages? No. A discussion has gone around over this topic, and the outcome was that HTML mail is not wanted. If you really need to send HTML, you can of course attach a webpage to an e-mail. http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#Does_Claws_Mail_allow_me_to_write_HTML_styled_messages.3F http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#...
- zerocrates 9y ago
  Thunderbird's slowness and other quirks got me to switch from it to the Windows mail app when I'm on Windows... suffice to say I don't recommend it. It looks nice and all, but isn't necessarily all that much faster, doesn't always render HTML email all that well, and has pieces of basic functionality mysteriously missing (i.e., to this day it doesn't understand what the Reply-To header is for). Chalk it up as another in a long line of Thunderbird alternatives that just don't measure up. I'd love to have something else I like (especially now in the twilight of XUL) but it's just a tough space.
narga 9y ago
Sylpheed is lack of good HTML render engine. That's why I still not change to Claws or Sylpheed because its. This time is 2017, and I don't want to read and imagining about the figure that was appeared as text description in email.
- lamby 9y ago
  Of course, some people think of this as a Feature.
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  I don't use this myself but in theory it should work: $ apt show claws-mail-fancy-plugin Package: claws-mail-fancy-plugin Version: 3.14.1-3+b1 ... Description: HTML mail viewer using GTK+2 WebKit This plugin for Claws Mail allows rendering of HTML email messages in the message window. . It uses the GTK+2 port of the webkit library to render HTML. . Supports printing HTML mails when html2ps package is installed.
self_awareness 9y ago
I'm yet to see a mail client that allows me to rename all contacts that have a specified email, then search by using those changed names. I mean, I don't want to get e-mails from "F4taL ErRoR <error404@gmail.com>", I want to get e-mails from "John Smith <error404@gmail.com>". Some clients kind of allow me to do that kind of aliasing, but then indexing and searching for those aliases don't work. Claws mail is one of them, Thunderbird as well.

172 points by generic_user 9y ago

dfox 9y ago

For last few years (after geting bitten by yet another breakage when upgrading evolution) I'm using claws-mail which is fork of sylpheed and it does everything I need from email client (and in contrast to evolution it even has usable windows version).

generic_user 9y ago
I have about the same experience, but with Thunderbird. Once I got my accounts set up in Sylpheed/Claws (I have used both) I found it did everything I needed, Its extremely stable has minimal dependency and uses negligible CPU and memory. I can compile Sylpheed form sources it in a few minutes on any recent version of Linux or BSD with little or no dependencies.

SwellJoe 9y ago

The screenshots on the page don't really do it justice. I mean, it's not the most beautiful email client in the world, but it doesn't look like 2001. Because it uses GTK it looks like the rest of your desktop (assuming your desktop is GNOME). I always end up going back to Thunderbird, for a variety of reasons. But, I try a bunch of other stuff every now and then. Sylpheed is not bad, but it's not got anything I don't get from Thunderbird, and Thunderbird is more actively maintained and has more capabilities. (I keep trying Evolution, and hating it, every single time. It's huge and thinks really hard about every single action and continues to be buggy. I don't know how something has been in really active development for decades and still has weird quirks and misbehavior without any actionable error messages.)

madez 9y ago
I also have made bad experiences with evolution. I wonder why major distributions still use it as their default client. Is there some good reason for that, or is it just neglect?
- Faaak 9y ago
  I'm forced at work to use an exchange account (so that implies using the calendar). Evolution was the only program I found that works on ubuntu and supports exchange somewhat (I didn't want at all to use the exchange web interface). So yeah, its a bit buggy, but it works for me
  - vetinari 9y ago
    If you don't mind having jre on your system and running a daemon: http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ Then you can use any client you want.
    - nekitamo 9y ago
      Have you managed to get davmail working with Office365/Outlook.com? It was unusably slow every time I tried (message fetching would take over a minute, inbox refresh would only happen once every ~30 minutes, etc...)
      - vetinari 9y ago
        No, fortunately, never had to.
- natermer 9y ago
  Because it's the email client that supports Exchange the best and related calendar/email features have been split off into daemons that provide things like email messaging and calendar notifications that integrate into the desktop. The reality is that all desktop email clients suck and suffer from neglect. Mostly because hard-core people are using things like mutt or emacs for mail and everybody else is using webmail. The reality is that IMAP effectively failed as a standard. The idea of 'mail folders' is somewhat of a improvement over the mbox format, but there was never any sort of search features or mail filtering features that became standardized for IMAP servers. There are a few aborted attempts and ways to program mail filtering, of course, but nothing that really works well or isn't confusing as hell for normal people. Webmail effectively started off as browser-based IMAP clients, but they have progressed far far beyond that and solved most of the issues with syncing email to desktops, laptops, and phones. Probably the answer to fixing this issue is going back to simple POP protocol and then using something like Notmuch to use 'search-like' features to logically group email into folders and such things without destructively editing emails like IMAP does. By this I mean with IMAP and maildir you are editing and moving files around on a remote file system and this means that if something goes wrong the mail gets duplicated or corrupted or out of order or whatever. By using a database-type approach with notmuch you are not touching the original emails for the most part, but simply editing and modifying metadata. The original structure and such are preserved.
educar 9y ago
I thought thunderbird was not actively maintained? This is great if that is the case.
- hackuser 9y ago
  That was the last I heard too, but it seems to be actively updated. For example, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/ Does anyone know the story?
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    There have been a couple of discussions here and elsewhere about it. My understanding is that Thunderbird is no longer a priority project for Mozilla Foundation and has no full-time developers paid by Mozilla, but it still uses Mozilla resources, and a number of volunteers continue to maintain it. So, it's kinda in the category of Sylpheed or Claws, in that it no longer has major corporate sponsors, I guess. I think Evolution has a bit more corporate sponsorship (Red Hat, which has developers working full-time on it, while SuSE stopped funding its development a while back; I don't think Canonical contributes in any significant way, either), so if having a corporate developer behind the mail client is necessary, I guess Evolution is the only choice for Linux users. Frankly, I wish Red Hat, and everybody else, would put its people on Thunderbird. It's far from perfect, but it's farther from awful than Evolution. But, I don't need Exchange integration, so I may be missing the big picture for corporate users.
    - fabrice_d 9y ago
      The Thunderbird community is quite active, as can be seen by the activity in the tb-planning mailing list (https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/ https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/). They know they have to pivot to a more modern codebase, and have been discussing modernizing TB on a regular basis. Most of the traffic in April is about a "Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies". Go read it!
Yetanfou 9y ago
What Claws [1] (a Sylpheed fork) has over Thunderbird is noticeable the moment you start it: speed. While Thunderbird is still busily indexing its bits, Claws has you reading your first message. Another thing it offers is an easy way to edit the 'From' address without needing to go through the hassle of creating an identity. For those who, like me, use special addresses any time they need to contact a commercial or governmental entity this makes life a lot easier. Just like Thunderbird, Claws supports extensions for things like PGP support, Sieve filter support, etc. Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. [1] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/
- lysium 9y ago
  Thunderbird allows editing the From header. I think this was a recent change from last year. I deleted my huge identity list.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Thunderbird is slow, I agree. But, it has some tools that make it easier for me to manage my huge volume of mail; plugins for auto-archiving, etc. The quick search feature is almost usable (compared to completely useless on most mail clients), which I guess is where the "indexing its bits" time is going to. It is a reasonable trade off for me, for now. I've never really loved a mail client, so saying I prefer Thunderbird is somewhat faint praise. Actually, maybe I love GMail (which is interesting, because making a web app that beats a native app is incredibly hard).
- derf_ 9y ago
  > Due to its speed and relatively low memory footprint Claws is a good choice for low-memory and/or low-cpu devices. I tried running claws-mail on my old N900. Just opening my basic IMAP inbox with 20,000 messages in it exhausted the memory of the device. I have some folders with 200,000 messages. This was a while ago, so things may have improved, since. The only client I've ever successfully run on such low-memory systems is webmail, or something like the Android mail client, which simply doesn't bother to look at more than a few hundred messages. The UX in both cases is abysmal, but they provide some functionality, which is a step up. I may not be a typical e-mail user.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Assuming the desktop is GNOME is a bold assumption, AFAIK there's no gnome under OSX nor windows, and personally GNOME has displayed so much bad faith and disdain for the need of its users that even if it were the best desktop available I would not touch it with a 10 foot stick. Also GTK applications usually do not look bad under KDE or LXDE or cinnamon, etc. That being said the official screenshots are horribly dated, maybe more than 10 years. They feature version 2.2 while current version is 3.5.1 better than words here a screenshot of sylpheed 3.5.1 under a plasma 5 desktop: https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png https://framapic.org/W9q8F6IAArBR/6aCKA6Wpk87V.png I tried a variety of email client and none have been fully satisfying, evolution was really painful to use and half-broken most of the time, it's been a while since I've used thunderbird and though it tends to work I have no plan to go back until it offers the possibility to prevent access with a password as the mozilla suite offered. Mutt was nice but I moved away for personal preferences. Right now I use kmail which I recommend you do NOT use, far from being the pain evolution was, it mostly work most of the time but when it does not you're in for a ride, the main drawback is the akonadi backend that offers nothing I want or need and gives me headache. every other day I have stop and restart akonadi so the new mails would show in my inbox, once in a while it fails silently to send email, the documentation is sparse and the bug reports are scary[1] and the fix you may finally find are not obvious[2]. I had hopes in trojita but last time I checked it was still not ready for daily use after years of development. I had even better hopes for caliopen[3] but current roadmap says late 2018. The good news is KDE has been working on replacing akonadi by Sink which is supposed to have learned from their mistakes and address the weak points of akonadi , and replacing kmail with kube which will leverage Sink and be consistent with roundcube next. Bad news is they've been at it for a couple years now and it's not done yet. Next in line for me to give a try are elementary OS' mail[4] and notmuch in emacs (also exists for vim). [1]: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cbug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&product=kmail2&query_format=advanced&resolution=--- https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=general&order=cha... [2]: http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidates-error-and-how-to-fix-it/ http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidate... [3]: https://www.caliopen.org/en/ https://www.caliopen.org/en/ [4]: https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail https://elementary.io/#showcase-mail
sigzero 9y ago
Those screenshots should really be updated.

mintplant 9y ago

As a point of comparison: why should I switch from Thunderbird to Sylpheed?

generic_user 9y ago
I used Thunderbird for a long time and then switched to Sylpheed. For one its about as good an email client as Thunderbird. That's all I really used TB for. If I want to use a calendar TB is not my first choice. I would rather use something along the lines of a project manager that has gnatt charts etc. So for email Sylpheed is elegant and lightweight and focused. I check my inbox and get my mail done then close it down and get back to what I was working on. Where as with TB I constantly had it open in the background and ended up messing with calendar and to-do more or less procrastinating.
fnj 9y ago
Why switch? I'll tell you why I switched from Thunderbird to Claws. I got sick of Thunderbird's pathological memory leaking. I start by email client when I log in and leave it running indefinitely (days-weeks). Thunderbird continually started out at 1 GB but grew over time without limit, even if only sitting idle, collecting mail. After a couple of days it would be creeping north of 6 GB. Several times it drove my PC into pathological swapping, making the PC impossible to use and extremely difficult even to get control of to shut down. Claws is currently using 0.1 GB, even after running for a week.
- chengiz 9y ago
  Thunderbird user for over a decade here, on both Linux and Windows, and have not seen this happen, ever. Firefox, I'd agree and it still does on Linux. Never had a problem with Thunderbird other than the disappearing Outlook calendars.
nickpsecurity 9y ago
Super fast and lightweight. That's what I liked about it.

soufron 9y ago

I've used Sylpheed for years and I miss it. I stopped using it because I switched to OSX at some point. But it's a beautiful piece of software.

rmind 9y ago
brew install sylpheed It is compiled and linked using the native X libraries on OS X, so it looks quite decent. There are versions using XQuartz, but I have had problems with the font rendering.

yeahGreat 9y ago

Not to be confused with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silpheed

sigi45 9y ago

Wow its ugly. While people might or not might trust google etc. The spam filter and the ui from gmail is just to good to switch to any offline client. I'm only using thunderbird for pgp mails.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> The spam filter ... is just to good to switch to any offline client. Your Gmail account is available over POP3 and IMAP. That means you enjoy the same spam filtering regardless of whether your use Gmail in your web browser or a dedicated e-mail client like Sylpheed.
- generic_user 9y ago
  It makes me think that these people have never used an offline email client and don't understand what pop and imap are.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    Most of the gmail users I know are a bit clueless and lacking in the technical domain and don't understand what an email client is because they've only ever used webmails. So I would not be surprised if they were unaware of pop and imap.
  - sigi45 9y ago
    First email client was outlook express, than thunderbird, than gmail. I tried mutt, i tried others. I'm not syncing my mails anymore i just get an pop up from my webbrowser that a new email is here. I also use different computers (home desktop, home laptop, work desktop) and prefer the same ui with the same settings on all pcs. The browser became in some way, my operating system for mails.
  - flukus 9y ago
    Is it that surprising? Webmail has existed for longer than most people have had email and it's not tied to a job or ISP like the previous most popular options were.

uzoodoo 9y ago

How does it compare with Claws Mail [0]? I've always assumed Claws is the more full-featured fork of Sylpheed, but seeing that they've diverged over a decade ago and are both still in development I'm curious how they compare. [0] http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/

Yetanfou 9y ago
http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#What_are_the_differences_between_Claws_Mail_and_Sylpheed.3F http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#... Back in 2001 Claws Mail (formerly 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. Claws Mail then evolved into the stable, extended version of Sylpheed, and in 2006 became an entity in its own right, in part due to different goals and the fact that syncing both codebases stopped happening. Claws Mail has many extra features compared to Sylpheed and is more powerful, yet is just as fast, lightweight and stable.
- uzoodoo 9y ago
  Well, considering that was written a decade ago, it doesn't really answer my question... http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Information&type=revision&diff=3029&oldid=1817 http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Inform...
ubernostrum 9y ago
I'm looking at the screenshots there and getting shuddering flashbacks to when I used to use Linux as my full-time desktop environment. The composition window which "helpfully" provides a breakdown of "Headers", "Attachments", and "Other" tabs. The preferences panel which thinks customizing the date format -- using strftime format strings -- is something that needs a preference...
- Yetanfou 9y ago
  You can get the same preference-laden programs for MacOS (which, for some reason, I assume you now use) and Windows, this is not a Linux-thing. Linux users who want to have things decided for them can use Gnome [1] or Unity [2], no such 'superfluous' preferences or extraneous tabs there. Linux does not equate complexity, nor does MacOS or Windows equate sane defaults and simplicity (iTunes comes to mind as an anti-example). The fact that these programs persist for such a long time indicates that there are people who prefer to make their own choices, no matter how superfluous these might seem in others eyes. [1] https://www.gnome.org/ https://www.gnome.org/ look ma, no preferences... [2] https://unity.ubuntu.com/ https://unity.ubuntu.com/ look ma, no future...

darklajid 9y ago

Trojita is my client of choice so far, I might have to reevaluate that again?

mike-cardwell 9y ago
Trojita is a really well written client. Fastest GUI based email client I've used, easily. They're still lacking on full PGP support though so I'm sticking to mutt for now.
bigbugbag 9y ago
IIANM Trojita is limited to a single imap account which makes it almost useless to me, as I would have to have an additional email client for the other accounts. Last time I checked trojita was still a work in progress with missing features and was not ready for production and daily use. Is it ready now ?
- ac29 9y ago
  I like trojita and used it for several months recently. It does a lot right, but the biggest reason I stopped using it is a lack of an address book, or some other form of email address autocomplete. Having to lookup old emails to figure out someones email address is just a deal breaker -- especially because the search isn't all that great either.
brongondwana 9y ago
Jan is one of the most active client authors on the standards lists. He really cares about getting the details right. It's nice to see!

screed 9y ago

last version for macOS 18 Apr 2014

hexmiles 9y ago

slighty off topic, but there are mail client that support at-rest encryption? For varius reason i need to run a mail client from a usb key, and i could't find a client that support the ability to encrypt the mailbox (also with addressbook and for windows). Veracrypt and similar solution are not applicable in my case.

mike-cardwell 9y ago
If your client supports PGP, you can always implement something like: https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incomi...
- hexmiles 9y ago
  i will look into that, it seem a step-up from my current setup. Thanks
bigbugbag 9y ago
I remember something called tutanota or totanuta that advertised itself as encrypting the data on the device itself (phone, tablet, computer,...).
- ComodoHacker 9y ago
  https://tutanota.com/ https://tutanota.com/ is an email service with end-to-end encryption. It has web UI and doesn't store data on the device.
  - hexmiles 9y ago
    Unfortunaly i need the mail to be stored on the device since i need to be able to access them even offline.
ComodoHacker 9y ago
Why container encryption is not suitable for you? If security of the host is a concern, you have to trust the host with any mail client anyway.

popey456963 9y ago

Must admit I am somewhat jaded with current mail applications and actually creating my own. Sylpheed is wonderful and the one I currently use, it's fast and works. My problem is with the GUI. Every single linked email client in this thread looks like it has come from 2005 and, unsurprisingly, most of them were created around then. Hoping that maybe by using some more modern libraries, and aiming for a material design-esque client, I might be able to make something easy to use and reliable.

benjie_homer 9y ago
Is it open source and are you looking for contributors? If I can help, I'll contribute.
- popey456963 9y ago
  Honoured to have your first post Benjie. It is open-source and made in Electron, but I'm not sure it's upto much at the moment. I've mostly been working on getting IMAP and SMTP setup as opposed to any graphical work. If you're interested in helping out, I'd love any help I can get. Email me at the address on my profile page and I can give you some more details. The current design looks as follows: https://puu.sh/vmtT6/b803a88da5.png https://puu.sh/vmtT6/b803a88da5.png
sidep 9y ago
I used Evolution for years and was surprised at how much faster Sylpheed is. The problem with email isn't only the GUI though.
stevekemp 9y ago
I wrote a mail-client, mine is console based with lua-scripting. I figured, when I started, that the task was simple, there are MIME-libraries, etc, out there, so to create a simple mail-client I only had to write three things: * A view of all maildirs/folders. * An index-view to show the contents of a maildir/folder. * A view of a single message. How naive I was. Broken email is everywhere. Things like IMAP support, GPG-support, and similar took months to get done. That moment when you're checking email in your spam-folder and your mail-client crashes? That happened far too often. Writing a mail client isn't hard, but it is fiddly, and you don't realize it until you think you're done. (UTF-handling, malformed MIME-messages, etc etc.) In the most sincere way possible: good luck!

dim13 9y ago

Does it still misses RFC 2177?

popey456963 9y ago
Pretty sure most applications don't need to support RFC 2177 to still be efficient. Long-polling for most IMAP servers requires one packet every nine minutes (to the best of my knowledge), which is literally nothing. It would take months of being run constantly to even get up to a megabyte of data being transferred. Some rough back of the envelope calculations: - 10 minutes per poll, 1440 minutes in a day, 144 packets per day. - 50 bytes per packet, 1,000,000 bytes to a megabyte, 20,000 packets required. - Roughly 140 days of time, or 5 months to reach a single megabyte. Aren't there some optimisations that are so minuscule it isn't worth implementing them?
- kwhitefoot 9y ago
  Of course but it so satisfying to reduce the overhead further. The struggle to reduce a megabyte of overhead by half a megabyte is great while knocking half a megabyte off a gigabyte is often trivial. I'm not arguing that anyone should try shaving the megabyte of course.

Fice 9y ago

I used Sylpheed a lot in the past. Very fast, clean, simple and reliable. But switched to Notmuch (with Emacs UI) years ago for its great flexibility and programmability, and due to my general preference for using Emacs modes over separate applications.

bigbugbag 9y ago
I'm considering switching to notmuch in emacs, is there any advice or specific thing I should know beforehand ?
- ymse 9y ago
  Know that all other mail clients will feel inadequate ever after. If you are forced to use something else at work, you might quit and end up homeless.

morimoritokyo 9y ago

Sylpheed is my all-time favorite e-mail app. In late 2001 I brought a Vaio C1 [1] back from Japan. 192 MB ram, Transmeta Crusoe processor that could burst to 600 MHz. Running Windows ME _everything_ was slow out of the box, but with Linux (Slackware), a minimal window manager (forget if it was XFCE, Enlightenment, or something else), and Sylpheed it just flew. Even with huge numbers of messages everything was snappy. It was amazing. I switched from Linux to Mac in 2009 and migrated to Mail.app at the time. It's not terrible, but even on recent hardware it feels more sluggish than Sylpheed did on that underpowered ultraportable in 2001. Good to see that it's still getting occasional updates 16 years later. 1. http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1VSX/ http://www.sony.jp/ProductsPark/Consumer/PCOM/PCG-C1VSX/

rntksi 9y ago
With MacOS, I particularly love MailMate. It's been with me for years, and I love how it handles the flow of editing mail messages. You take care of the contents, it takes care of formatting. If you've ever tried LaTeX, it's a similar concept.
- h1d 9y ago
  Used mailmate when Mail.app was slightly buggy some years ago but then got tired of mailmate being buggy as well (iirc, takes seconds selecting multiple mails, changes column width after showing mail folders on/off, message signature inserting unnecessary new line and crashes randomly and never had those fixed in a year or something), I switched back to Mail.app in Sierra, seems responsive and trouble free so far.
zomg 9y ago
i've been using spark on all my apple devices and i love it. reminds me of sparrow, before google gobbled them up. https://sparkmailapp.com/ https://sparkmailapp.com/
w8rbt 9y ago
I used Sylpheed in 2001 for awhile before moving mostly to mutt. Recently, I found my old Sylpheed mail folders. 16 years later Sylpheed reads those mail folders and works just like it did back in the day. Still very fast and responsive too.

krick 9y ago

Not unlike many others, I use Thunderbird and sometimes think about switching to something else (main reasons are speed and usability). But I guess what many of us need much more than better email client is better email workflow. I have dozens of filters and always keep my inbox empty, and yet I think may be the real thing is I don't really manage my emails properly. Maybe I just need to set up this filter to delete stuff instead of moving it (I'm not really keen on deleting stuff in general, always feels unsafe and shortsighted), maybe I need some other system. By the way, using Gmail web-interface (and Gmail is not the only mail provider I use) feels almost as unsatisfactory, as Thunderbird: ok, filters and search are a bit better, and it physically cannot hung-up my whole system under load, but otherwise it is as needy and clumsy as Thunderbird. I remember receiving several thousands of emails overnight because of some programmers mistake, and deleting it was quite painful: I'd gladly tell Gmail "just delete all this stuff" (by filter), but I didn't find any way to do so, I had to fall back to slowly manually deleting my mail by 200-item batches. Would be interesting to hear how other people manage their mailboxes.

fabiofzero 9y ago

Wow, this brings back memories! I used Syplheed Claws when I was still running Mandrake - before it was merged and became Mandriva.

drvortex 9y ago

I cannot understand the relevance of an email client, now that browsers can do email. It may be my workflow, so I will ask: Is there any scenario where an email client would be necessary - i.e. a browser based solution will not work?

icemelt8 9y ago
If you have an email address that is not gmail, which browser email client will you use?
r3bl 9y ago
> Is there any scenario where an email client would be necessary - i.e. a browser based solution will not work? Here's one: multiple email accounts that you need to check on a regular basis. I would lose my mind if I had to track my emails across three different web interfaces.

vanous 9y ago

HTML vs plaintext The plaintext email only nature resonated with me for long time but many email and chat services have gone rich text and it's great. Why I say that...I used to use claws mail for many years for business email but being able to at least make text bold or add an inline image is valuable. For personal email mutt is great for me and Gmail too nowadays but for business to business, HTML is required. It took me a while to get Thunderbird to mimick Claws. Thunderbird is much slower and crashing randomly frequently but is the best from the crowd. Does Claws Mail allow me to write HTML styled messages? No. A discussion has gone around over this topic, and the outcome was that HTML mail is not wanted. If you really need to send HTML, you can of course attach a webpage to an e-mail. http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#Does_Claws_Mail_allow_me_to_write_HTML_styled_messages.3F http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php/General_Information#...

zerocrates 9y ago
Thunderbird's slowness and other quirks got me to switch from it to the Windows mail app when I'm on Windows... suffice to say I don't recommend it. It looks nice and all, but isn't necessarily all that much faster, doesn't always render HTML email all that well, and has pieces of basic functionality mysteriously missing (i.e., to this day it doesn't understand what the Reply-To header is for). Chalk it up as another in a long line of Thunderbird alternatives that just don't measure up. I'd love to have something else I like (especially now in the twilight of XUL) but it's just a tough space.

narga 9y ago

Sylpheed is lack of good HTML render engine. That's why I still not change to Claws or Sylpheed because its. This time is 2017, and I don't want to read and imagining about the figure that was appeared as text description in email.

lamby 9y ago
Of course, some people think of this as a Feature.
Yetanfou 9y ago
I don't use this myself but in theory it should work: $ apt show claws-mail-fancy-plugin Package: claws-mail-fancy-plugin Version: 3.14.1-3+b1 ... Description: HTML mail viewer using GTK+2 WebKit This plugin for Claws Mail allows rendering of HTML email messages in the message window. . It uses the GTK+2 port of the webkit library to render HTML. . Supports printing HTML mails when html2ps package is installed.

self_awareness 9y ago

I'm yet to see a mail client that allows me to rename all contacts that have a specified email, then search by using those changed names. I mean, I don't want to get e-mails from "F4taL ErRoR <error404@gmail.com>", I want to get e-mails from "John Smith <error404@gmail.com>". Some clients kind of allow me to do that kind of aliasing, but then indexing and searching for those aliases don't work. Claws mail is one of them, Thunderbird as well.