Sylpheed – a simple, lightweight but featureful e-mail client
sylpheed.sraoss.jp
sylpheed.sraoss.jp
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.)
So yeah, its a bit buggy, but it works for me
Then you can use any client you want.
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.
Search is built into the IMAP protocol. [1]
Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer. That said, "Sieve" is really powerful, and there are many SMTP and IMAP servers which support it.
> Filtering doesn't belong at the IMAP protocol layer anymore than it belongs at the SMTP layer.
Right, so users are forced to set up this stuff for each and every device they have. This is a big reason why the exodus to webmail and the proprietary internal-only protocols they use.
Seive is really powerful and I've used it plenty of times, but it's not standard and is something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients. Unless you are a big email nerd that runs your own servers it's pretty much worthless.
You can get desktop and web based and command line clients which talk the ManageSieve protocol so provide you with an interface to manage your server based sieve mail filters [1]
I'll agree that it's not common. Not because there is anything wrong with it, but because companies like Google decided to roll their own for whatever reason.
I can see use cases for needing to search across multiple folders. I guess I've not felt the need to do that myself before. However, no reason your IMAP client couldn't search folders one after the other, or open multiple connections and search multiple folders simultaneously.
It is, actually. https://wiki.tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5804
> something that needs to be done completely separate from almost all email clients.
In that it is not part of IMAP, yes. However, webmail clients like Roundcube and desktop clients like Thunderbird and Claws/Sylpheed all offer plugins.
When you choose the gnome flavor of said distros, I suppose that it comes with evolution because it is the official default email client for gnome until its replacement, geary, is ready. But last time I checked in 2015 it was still in early stages of development despite having started circa 2012.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.0/releasenotes/
Does anyone know the story?
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.
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!
Then again, the tools are much better than ever. Building desktop apps can move very fast with Electron (or similar) and the like. Nonetheless, I think I'm on the pessimistic side of the argument about a total rewrite. I wish them well, but I suspect it'll fizzle out, as previous similar efforts have.
There have been other posts about it, but that's a reasonable place to start. Spolsky has also written about the dangers of rewrites, including Mozilla as one very public case study.
Interestingly, jwz also had a lot of things to say about the mail client that became Thunderbird, back when it was part of the Netscape suite.
There's a really long history with the Mozilla projects, and many lessons have had to be learned multiple times. I wonder if perhaps this is one of those occasions. Then again, the best thing that ever happened to Mozilla was Firefox, and that was one lone programmer deciding to (kinda) rewrite the damned thing to be lean and mean and scuttle all of the ancillary crap that Mozilla had accrued over the years. Maybe Thunderbird needs the same treatment...but, where's the Blake Ross to do it?
Additionally, you'll be treated to some specially prepared, uh, eggs if you click through to his site from HN.
Then 1 or 2 years ago mozilla announced that thunderbird sharing the firefox codebase was unnecessarily taxing firefox and the remaining thunderbird developers were struggling to follow the pace of firefox. Moreover that they believed thunderbird had little potential to have an impact as firefox has. So they proposed to separate thunderbird from firefox and cut the ties entirely.
Last news I heard was that Thunderbird could join seamonkey and become a community effort with some backing from mozilla[1].
[1]: http://www.ghacks.net/2017/03/10/seamonkey-thunderbird-to-jo...
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.
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).
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.
I just tested it on a folder containing 40.000 message (list archive), this increases the RSS to 82 MB. The same folder in mutt takes 64 MB. In other words, the 'penalty' paid for a GUI instead of a TUI is around 10MB + ~15%.
I should give it a try again sometime.
The really nice thing about Virtual Identity is that it remembers which From address you use for each To address. Additionally, if you reply to someone that you've not written to before, VI uses the incoming mail's To address as the outgoing mail's From address.
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
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=cha...
[2]: http://www.dvratil.cz/2017/01/kmail-multiple-merge-candidate...
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.claws-mail.org/faq/index.php?title=General_Inform...
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...
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/ look ma, no preferences... [2] https://unity.ubuntu.com/ look ma, no future...
I can compile Sylpheed form sources it in a few minutes on any recent version of Linux or BSD with little or no dependencies.
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.
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#...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had a request today to stop archiving or deleting mails older than three months. I never do that. They just hadn't figured out the paging buttons in the upper right of the interface. They had been thinking there were only 50 mails available in all of Gmail until this morning. They don't get the conversation model of GMail
Most used to use Office Outlook.
I don't use an offline client because I use a home desktop, phone, and work desktop that aren't the same os.
I am using the paid Gmail product, no idea if that makes it any different.
I assume the volume they deal in would make a Bayesian filter more effective.
I may be not seeing issues as we spent a fair amount of time using the "report spam" and "not spam" buttons when we first signed up for Google Apps, so it's been trained to our use case. It works very well for us.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gmail+keybindings&atb=v16&ia=cheat...
(not that I don't appreciate utilitarian design. Claws and Emacs come to mind.)
By coincidence, I used Sylpheed before and Thunderbird before that. I found both easier to learn than notmuch-mode, but ultimately lacking, especially regarding handling of encrypted messages.
I switched to Sylpheed from Thunderbird, which is arguably uglier, slower and more clunky in operation (at least on Windows).
In an age of fat, slow, memory-hogging Electron apps (often produced by large companies with lots of developers), Slypheed is a refreshing example of a slim, cross-platform desktop app maintained by just a single developer. It should serve as inspiration for others.
it's not the shiniest UI around but the current one is hardly ugly.
I never really understood that. People do all this work on some software yet don't spend a minute making a half decent website, the first impression of all their work. It's a shame.
And what is wrong with current site?
Matter of taste. I personally find it much more comfortable than gmail ui - less clutter and much faster
>spam filter
Works on server, used MUA does not affect it
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.
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:
* 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!
$ 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.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 ?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incomi...
Also more that the host, i don't trust myself not loosing the usbkey :)
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.
- 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?
I'm not arguing that anyone should try shaving the megabyte of course.