# 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.

## Useful URLs

Website: www.sylpheed-claws.net

Latest News: http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/news.php

Extra Plugins: http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/plugins.php

Icon Themes: http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/themes.php

Tools: http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/tools.php

Mailing Lists: http://www.sylpheed-claws.net/MLs.php

Bugtracker: http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/sylpheed-claws/bugzilla/

Project: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sylpheed-claws/