claws-mail/manual/intro.xml

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<section id="ch_intro">
<title>Introduction</title>

  <section id="intro_what">
    <title>What is Sylpheed-Claws?</title>
    <para>
	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.
    </para>
  </section>

  <section id="intro_whatnot">
    <title>What Sylpheed-Claws is not</title>
    <para>
	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. 
    </para>
  </section>

  <section id="intro_features"> 
    <title>Main features</title>
    <para>
	    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 <ulink url="http://claws.sylpheed.org/features.php">http://claws.sylpheed.org/features.php</ulink>.
    </para>
  </section>

  <section id="intro_history">
    <title>History of Sylpheed-Claws</title>
    <para>
	Sylpheed-Claws has existed since April 2001. The primary goal of Sylpheed-Claws was to be a test-bed for potential features of Sylpheed (<ulink url="http://sylpheed.good-day.net/">http://sylpheed.good-day.net/</ulink>), 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.
    </para><para>
	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.
    </para>
  </section>

  <section id="intro_information">
    <title>Useful URLs</title>
    <para>
	Website: <ulink url="http://claws.sylpheed.org/">http://claws.sylpheed.org/</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Latest News: <ulink url="http://claws.sylpheed.org/news.php">http://claws.sylpheed.org/news.php</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Extra Plugins: <ulink url="http://claws.sylpheed.org/plugins.php">http://claws.sylpheed.org/plugins.php</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Icon Themes: <ulink url="http://claws.sylpheed.org/themes.php">http://claws.sylpheed.org/themes.php</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Tools: <ulink url="http://claws.sylpheed.org/tools.php">http://claws.sylpheed.org/tools.php</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Users' Mailing List: <ulink url="http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sylpheed-claws-users/">http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sylpheed-claws-users/</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Bugtracker: <ulink url="http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/sylpheed-claws/bugzilla/">http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/sylpheed-claws/bugzilla/</ulink>
    </para>
    <para>
	Project: <ulink url="http://sourceforge.net/projects/sylpheed-claws/">http://sourceforge.net/projects/sylpheed-claws/</ulink>
    </para>
  </section>

</section>