Introduction
What is Sylpheed-Claws?
Sylpheed-Claws 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 Sylpheed-Claws developers try hard to keep it lightweight, so that it should be usable on low-end computers without much memory or CPU power.
What Sylpheed-Claws is not
Sylpheed-Claws is not a full-featured Personal Information Manager like Evolution or Outlook, although external plugins provide these functionalities. Sylpheed-Claws 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
Sylpheed-Claws 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 complete list of features can be found at http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/features.php.
History of Sylpheed-Claws
Sylpheed-Claws has existed since April 2001. The primary goal of Sylpheed-Claws was to be a test-bed for potential features of Sylpheed (http://sylpheed.good-day.net/), 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 Sylpheed-Claws 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.