Introduction
What is Claws Mail?
Claws Mail is an email client aiming at being fast, easy-to-use and
powerful. It is mostly desktop-independent, but tries to integrate
with your desktop as best as possible. The Claws Mail developers try
hard to keep it lightweight, so that it should be usable on low-end
computers without much memory or CPU power.
What Claws Mail is not
Claws Mail is not a full-featured Personal Information Manager like
Evolution or Outlook, although external plugins provide these
functionalities. Claws Mail will not let you write and send HTML
emails or other kind of annoyances, hence it may not be the software
you need in some business environments.
Main features
Claws Mail sports almost everything a perfect email client needs.
Mail retrieval over POP3, IMAP4, local mbox, over SSL; support for
various authentication schemes. It has multiple accounts and
mailboxes, powerful filtering and search functionality, import/export
capabilities using a number of formats, support for GnuPG (digital
signatures and encryption). It supports plugins, customisable
toolbars, spell checking, a number of guards to prevent any data loss,
per-folder preferences, and much more. A list of features can be
found at www.claws-mail.org/features.php.
History of Claws Mail
Claws Mail has existed since April 2001. It was initially named
Sylpheed-Claws and changed its name to Claws Mail in November 2006.
The primary goal of Sylpheed-Claws was to be a test-bed for potential
features of Sylpheed, so that new features could be tested thoroughly
without compromising Sylpheed's stability. Sylpheed-Claws developers
regularly synchronised their codebase with Sylpheed's codebase, and
Sylpheed's author, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, took back the new features he
liked once they were stabilised.
Originally both Sylpheed and Claws Mail were based on GTK1. The work
on the GTK2 versions started in early 2003, and the first modern
(GTK2-based) Sylpheed-Claws was released in March 2005. Since about
this time, Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws' goals started to diverge more,
and Sylpheed-Claws became an entity of its own. This is why its name
is now Claws Mail.