O’Reilly Network: Introducing Sylpheed

“Sylpheed really shines after you create the accounts
and start to actually use the application. The first thing you will
notice is the responsiveness of the application. Most of the email
clients I had previously tried would pause for a noticable amount
of time when you clicked a message to dislay it. I could never
imagine selecting all messages in a folder and marking them as
read/unread. With Sylpheed, there’s virtually no delay. You see the
messages in the display pane right away. Sending and receiving
email does not disable the main window, which allows you to keep
reading your messages or compose new ones while this operation is
underway.

This brings us to the most annoying feature of Sylpheed. Each
time the application tries to check for new email, it pops up a
mini window in the center of the screen. If you have a lot of
accounts, this mini window will stay there for a long time. You
cannot hide or disable this window. There’s no configuration that
will make this annoyance go away.

However, if you’re thinking “well, it’s open source, I can just
modify the code and add that option myself,” don’t launch vi, emacs
, or another text editor just yet. Another group of Sylpheed lovers
have already done just that, and more. Their version is called
Sylpheed-Claws, which is advertised as the “bleeding edge” version
of Sylpheed. They even claim it “bites.” This bleeding edge version
routinely takes Sylpheed and enhances it to make it even more
configurable. Some enhancements also find their way to the main
Sylpheed release.”

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