# 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 (sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/), 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.

## Useful URLs

Website: www.claws-mail.org

Latest News: www.claws-mail.org/news.php

Extra Plugins: www.claws-mail.org/plugins.php

Icon Themes: www.claws-mail.org/themes.php

Tools: www.claws-mail.org/tools.php

Mailing Lists: www.claws-mail.org/MLs.php

Bugtracker: www.thewildbeast.co.uk/claws-mail/bugzilla/

Source code: sourceforge.net/projects/sylpheed-claws/files/