Yes. Here are links to several translations:

You can always download this FAQ from the Sylpheed Documentation Project website.

Sylpheed is an email client (and news reader) based on GTK+, running on the X Window System or Microsoft Windows, and aiming for:

As the Sylpheed README file reads: The appearance and interface are similar to some popular e-mail clients for Windows, such as Outlook Express or Becky!. Many commands are accessible with the keyboard like the Emacs-based mailers such as Mew and Wanderlust. So you will be able to migrate to Sylpheed without much discomfort, even if you are accustomed to other mailers.

You can download it from the download page on Sylpheed website. There are links to download tarball sources, patches to the previous version, and also links to the Sylpheed for Windows binaries, including the installer, the ZIP archive, and the patch to the previous Sylpheed for Windows version.

Depending on the state of the Sylpheed development cycle, you may be offered links to development versions such as beta and RC releases. These might not be suitable for everyday use, however, so you may want to stick with the stable release, anyway.

Also on the download page, you can download Sylph-Searcher (which is a program that enables fast full-text search of messages stored in mailboxes of Sylpheed, or normal MH folders), and LibSylph (which is a library that provides Sylpheed core features independent from the UI of Sylpheed).

Hiroyuki Yamamoto <hiro-y@kcn.ne.jp>.

It means light weight, like air. This comes from the name of the wind spirits, the Sylphs.

Mails are stored in the MH mailfile format as used by MH and EMH. Maildir, mbox, and eml formats are not (yet) supported, although it is possible to import an mbox file or an eml file into a Sylpheed mailbox.

You can manage your mails just with Sylpheed, or together with another mailer based on the MH format (e.g. Mew). The MH format has less possibility of losing mails on failures since one file corresponds to one mail. You can also utilize fetchmail and/or procmail, and external programs on receiving (like inc or imget).

Auto collection works since version 0.5.1. If you need it or want it, you should upgrade.

Yes. You can find it in Configuration -> Filter settings...

Please note that filtering is not yet implemented for IMAP accounts.

Yes. As of version 0.4.99 IMAP is supported.

Yes.

Yes, IPv6 is fully supported in Sylpheed.

Yes. GPG is implemented and works fine. For activating it in Sylpheed, see the appropriate question in the Installation section.

Sylpheed uses the Mutt type of mime checking.

No. A discussion has gone around over this topic, and the outcome was that HTML mail is not wanted. If you really need to send HTML, you can of course attach a web page to an email.

Yes. When you search for a name that starts with "don", type "don" (without the quotes) and it will show you the correct name (when only one "don" exists in your address book. Otherwise a drop-down list appears, which allows you to select the name you want. E.g. Donald Duck, Don Johnson. But also email addresses starting with "don" will appear in the list (like "don.giovanni@maffia.org").

Prior to Sylpheed 3.1, users needed to press the Tab key before the search would start. If you still prefer the previous behavior, you can enable it by checking Configuration->Common preferences...->Details->Other->Address book+Address auto-completion:+Start with Tab.

When you want to use name completion, make sure that there are names in your address book. If there are no names, even Sylpheed has a hard time completing something.

If nothing happens at all when typing text in the address fields, make sure that you have the address auto-completion enabled by checking that the following preference is not selected: Configuration->Common preferences...->Details->Other->Address book+Address auto-completion:+Disabled.

That's what it is designed for!

In most cases, current patches are being posted by Sylpheed users and contributors to the Sylpheed mailing list <sylpheed@sraoss.jp>. (Also see the Installation section on how to install a patch.)

To talk to others, you should join the Sylpheed mailing list at http://www.sraoss.jp/mailman/listinfo/sylpheed . Note that there is a Japanese and an English list, so pick the right one! If you have made a patch that you want the world to know of, please post it either to the mailing list, or contact the Sylpheed author, Hiroyuki Yamamoto <hiro-y@kcn.ne.jp>.

Please supply the information of Tools->Log window, or the contents of sylpheed.log, which is located under the configuration folder, when reporting bugs.

If ISO-8859-1 characters (>= 0x80) are not used in the message body, Sylpheed will automatically set the charset value in the Content-Type header as US-ASCII.

Word wrapping is a bit peculiar perhaps. You can type lines as long as you like. By the time you send or queue a mail with long lines, Sylpheed will first wrap the lines to the line length you set up, and then the mail is queued. This is more convenient than you think. Once a line is wrapped (hard line breaks are inserted in the text) and you add something in a line there, the next line will move to a separate new line, leaving one or two words from the previous line "hanging there" alone. E.g.

Now you add one word in the first line:

This would cause you a lot of manual reformatting to get a presentable mail again.

You need to copy the sylpheed-2.0 directory with your user profile, and your entire local mail archive.

Under UNIX, the user profile is stored in $HOME/.sylpheed-2.0 by default, and your local mail archive is by default located in $HOME/Mail.

While under Windows 2000/XP, the user profile is stored in C:\Documents and Settings\(user name)\Application Data\Sylpheed by default, and your local mail archive is by default located in C:\Documents and Settings\(user name)\Application Data\Sylpheed\Mailboxes\Mail.

Under Windows Vista/Seven, the directory paths are C:\Users\(user name)\AppData\Roaming\Sylpheed, and C:\Users\(user name)\AppData\Roaming\Sylpheed\Mailboxes\Mail, respectively.

Yes, just create/select the folder you want your mails in, and select Import mbox file... in the File menu.

Yes. Just make sure that you add /. to the end of a rule so procmail knows you are filtering into an MH mail folder. Example:

0:
* ^Subject:.*sylpheed
sylpheedmail/.

Check man procmail for details.

Yes!

You should always read the NEWS document (and also NEWS-x.0 if you are upgrading from a very old version) that is included in the release tarballs. The NEWS can also be viewed on the appropriate Sylpheed website page.

Just press Alt-U or select Update summary from the View menu.

If one wishes to use gvim as an external editor it's necessary to start it with the no-fork option -f, i.e. in the configuration dialog box you need to enter gvim -f %s. If not the editor forks and open up a separate file and when one quits the editor the changes are lost and don't show up in the composer window. (Thanks, Ed Collins!)

Yes, select the part in the text view and choose Reply.

You need to disable quoting by editing the reply format under Configuration->Common preferences->Compose tab->Format tab (also works with forward format which you can see below the reply format in the configuration dialog).

Yes. It has a bogofilter and a bsfilter support. Just go to Configuration->Common preferences...->Junk mail and check Enable Junk mail control. Then you can select a Learning command preset of your choice, or possibly use custom commands.

You can also use other spam filters thanks to the Actions functionality (available under Configuration->Actions...).

As of Sylpheed 3.1, there is an Attachment Tool Plug-in distributed with the Sylpheed source code and available under plugin/attachment_tool/. Its only function is to remove attachments from selected messages and is provided more or less as a technology preview. More plug-ins are planned since Sylpheed 3.0, released in early 2010, and later supports a plug-in interface. In the future, some of the Sylpheed features will be re-implemented as plug-ins, and, moreover, various other plug-ins will be released.

There is a page on the Sylpheed website dedicated to the plug-in interface. Additionally, the PLUGIN.txt file distributed directly with Sylpheed can provide you with some basic information on the topic.

Go to http://sylpheeddoc.sourceforge.net and check out the FAQ and manual from the Sylpheed Documentation Project (sylpheeddoc). Both documents are available in multiple languages there and usually contain the latest updates. The direct links are as follows:

Also see the question about available language versions at the top of this section.

The source DocBook XML files in which this document is written can be obtained from a public CVS repository that is part of the Sylpheed Documentation Project. The source files with all the necessary build system, XSL stylesheets or snapshots are stored under the "doc" module in the CVS repository and can be checked out through anonymous CVS with the following commands (simply press Enter when prompted for a password):

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@sylpheeddoc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/sylpheeddoc login

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@sylpheeddoc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/sylpheeddoc co -P doc

The source files are also included in .tar.gz and .zip archives made available with each documentation release, these can be downloaded from the appropriate project page. For more information on the used project infrastructure, please see the project website.

Please report any errors, misleading and/or outdated information to the Sylpheed Documentation Project. You can see the list of Project members in the following question, so you can also contact them directly.

The current members of the Sylpheed Documentation Project are:

Francois Barriere      fbarriere at users.sourceforge.net
Petr Kovar             pknbe at users.sourceforge.net

Below is the list of former members of the Sylpheed Documentation Project. Big thank you goes to all of them!

Martin   Bretschneider furbour at users.sourceforge.net
Olivier  Delhomme      dup at users.sourceforge.net
Doruk    Fisek         dobidik at users.sourceforge.net
Melvin   Hadasht       mhadasht at users.sourceforge.net
Nicolas  Kaiser        nikai at users.sourceforge.net
Paul     Kater         pkater at users.sourceforge.net
Ricardo  Mones Lastra  mones at users.sourceforge.net
Jens     Oberender     jobi at users.sourceforge.net
Marcelo  Ramos         hackpando at users.sourceforge.net
Guido    Rudolphi      malatesta at users.sourceforge.net
Frank    Weng          fweng at users.sourceforge.net

Any POSIX compliant UNIX or similar OS, e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris. GTK+ 2.4.0 or later (GTK+ 2.6.0 or later is recommended). A recent ANSI C compiler (gcc 2.7.2.3 should also work).

Optionally:

Otherwise ./configure will fail. See also the INSTALL file that is being distributed with the Sylpheed tarball.

Note that as Sylpheed now supports the Windows platform, you can also compile it using MinGW.

When you run Sylpheed for the first time, it will ask you where you want to store your mailboxes. The default is $HOME/Mail (or %APPDATA%\Sylpheed\Mailboxes\Mail under Windows). You can change this to anything you like as long as it is a valid directory name.

Furthermore, you need to create at least one account to be able to receive or send messages.

Sylpheed reports such an error if it can't create the default mailboxes (inbox, outbox, etc.). This can be because $HOME/Mail (or %APPDATA%\Sylpheed\Mailboxes\Mail under Windows) already contains files with the same names. This occurs when switching from Kmail to Sylpheed, in this case backup and remove the existing Mail directory or use another name for the Sylpheed mail directory.

After loading Sylpheed for the first time, you can add an email account by clicking the Configuration menu. Select the option Create new account and let the configuration assistant help you with the initial setup. In a few easy steps, the assistant allows you to conveniently configure your POP3, IMAP4, or Gmail account.

The number is unlimited. The limit is reached when your computer stops responding.

Yes, add a new account using Configuration->Edit accounts...+Add and set the Protocol to None (local).

You have to click the Execute button. The other solution: in the configuration settings (Common preferences...->Details->Interface), you have to check the Execute immediately when moving or deleting messages box.

Yes, you can. Under Configuration->Preferences for current account...->Advanced, you can specify the exact port addresses you want to use.

Yes. You can switch it on and off in the View menu, just select Thread view or press Ctrl-T.

Absolutely. This is no problem.

You need to create at least one account in order to send. (This is a wonderful gotcha on LAN installs with only a local mailbox feed).

Copy patch to sylpheed directory. Apply the patch as follows:

% patch -p0 < some.patch

Or, if it's gzipped:

% gzip -dc some.patch.gz | patch -p0

Run ./autogen.sh, remove the generated /config.cache file (unless you want to install in prefix /usr/local). Run ./configure with the appropriate options and then make. (Text as found on the former Sylpheed patches page.)

You have to have a package called libcompface installed, so this is available for compiling into Sylpheed. Note that the exact name of the package depends on OS or distribution you use.

The faces package contains a program called xbm2ikon script, which converts a 48x48 xbm to the format suitable for compface. Thanks to Jeff Dairiki, you can have a complete online course in this. Visit this page for the details.

In the settings part of the program, write sylpheed --compose

Specific options for typical browsers:

When compiling Sylpheed, make sure you add --enable-gpgme in the ./configure command. When that completes successfully, there is a Privacy section in the Common Preferences.

For this to work you need to use the touch command in every MH folder. "touch" the file .xmhcache and Mutt should do just fine.

In case this happens, you can easily fix that by adding the following to /etc/mime.types:

image/gif gif

New mail can be retrieved either manually or automatically.

To check for new mail the manual way, you can:

If you prefer autochecking for new mail instead, first of all, make sure that you have checked Configuration->Common preferences...->Receive+Autocheck new mail every 10 minute(s). Optionally, you can adjust the interval value (in minutes) as well.

Also check your settings under Configuration->Edit accounts... You will find this at the top: Check the boxes on the 'G' column to enable message retrieval by 'Get all'. The setting applies on both manual and automatic mail checks.

Download Gkrellm or a similar program that is able to notify you of new incoming mail. Gkrellm is available at the Gkrellm page.

Yes. You need to have GtkSpell installed prior to Sylpheed compilation. The support for GtkSpell is enabled by default in configure. (If you want to disable it, make sure you add --disable-gtkspell in the ./configure command.)

The GtkSpell option is not supported in Sylpheed for Windows (yet), so you will have no spell checking under this OS.

In the Configuration->Preferences for current account...->Send check Add user-defined header and press Edit button. A dialog appears, add a header named "X-Face" and fill the value field with your face data. Note that if you paste the data from a terminal into the field, some spurious newlines can be added, and these can mangle your face, be careful.

Move to an appropriate directory, and after you run the command specified below, a source tree named trunk will be created under that directory:

svn checkout svn://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/sylpheed/trunk

The subdirectories under the sylpheed directory are as follows:

To update to the newest source tree, run the following command in the target directory:

svn update

The SVN versions are meant to be used by developers rather than "normal" users, so the source (or binary) distributions are easier to use.

You need to generate the configure script by running autogen.sh. Be sure to have autoconf and automake packages installed for this.

There are some *.m4 files in the ac/missing directory. Try to copy them into the ac directory and run autogen.sh again.

If there are still some .m4 files not found (e.g. those from GTK+), try to run % locate m4 | less or % locate aclocal | less to find additional directories containing those macros. If you find e.g. a gtk.m4 in /opt/gnome/share/aclocal, change following line in autogen.sh from

aclocal -I ac \

to

aclocal -I ac -I /opt/gnome/share/aclocal \

and run it again.

Remove the config.cache file and run ./configure again. You should also use make clean to avoid undefined references.

The MIME-type to application associations are kept in /etc/mailcap.

The extension to MIME-type associations are kept in /etc/mime.types

You need to update Sylpheed cache. Right click on the mailbox and choose Rebuild folder tree.

Sylpheed keeps its configuration files in $HOME/.sylpheed-2.0/sylpheedrc (or %APPDATA%\Sylpheed\sylpheedrc under Windows) and creates default entries, if none are found. So the easiest way is to quit Sylpheed, temporarily renaming your $HOME/.sylpheed-2.0 (or %APPDATA%\Sylpheed\sylpheedrc) e.g. to *.bak and restarting Sylpheed in order to get default entries.

Here are the most common variables:

For more information on how to make Sylpheed display your language, see the relevant question.

In most cases, this is caused by fonts that use an unsuitable encoding on a not Unicode-based system. (On a Unicode-based system, fonts should support all thinkable characters for the vast majority of languages.)

Choose Configuration->Common preferences...->Display->General, and click the button right to Text font. Now, a special dialog appears that allows you to pick a desirable font family, style, and size.

You should also make sure that your environment variables regarding locale settings have sensible values.

You can try to export your old mailbox to MH, MBOX or EML format.

Sylpheed config files can be found in $HOME/.sylpheed-2.0 (under Windows, the path is %APPDATA%\Sylpheed). They are in plain text format and quite easy to understand, so don't fear to take a look into them using a text editor.

The configuration files and the mailboxes are saved under the following location (%APPDATA%\Sylpheed) by default:

If you want to change the location of the configuration files, you can specify it by the command line option --configdir "directory name". Create a shortcut of sylpheed.exe, and append the option to the link target like the following:

"C:\Program Files\Sylpheed\sylpheed.exe" --configdir "D:\Sylpheed"

If sylpheed.ini file exists at the same location as sylpheed.exe, it will be loaded at startup. With this approach, you can make Sylpheed completely portable independent of drive letters etc., and you can install it in removable media such as USB memory.

The sample INI file is included in the Sylpheed for Windows installation package as sample-sylpheed.ini. Please copy or rename it to use. ipcport specifies the port number of socket for IPC (default is 50215). configdir specifies the location of configuration files as a relative path from the folder in which sylpheed.exe is located, or an absolute path.

(The text above is a slightly modified excerpt from the README-win32.txt file, which you should find within the C:\Program Files\Sylpheed directory.)

Yes, Sylpheed 3.1 adds support for this often requested feature. The format of the multiple instances command is as follows:

sylpheed --instance-id ID --configdir path-to-alternative-configdir

Default ID is set to sylpheed, so you can specify any other instance ID. The ID is used for the name of unix domain socket (under UNIX), or mutex name (under Windows). configdir specifies the configuration directory, i.e. the location of configuration files you want to use with the given instance.

You can use enscript for this. Use enscript %s to print everything on one page, or enscript -U2 %s for printing two logical pages on one physical page.

You have to set some environment variables, such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES to your local language. Usually LANG (or LC_ALL) is sufficient. Note that modern distributions and operating systems do this for you automatically.

Under UNIX, if you need to set e.g. the LANG environment variable manually, execute the following command (using sh or related shell):

export LANG=value

Replace value with a valid ISO language code (e.g. en_GB for British English).

If you intend to set the displayed language manually under Windows, you can do so by creating the LANG environment variable with a valid ISO language code value under Control Panel->System->Advanced+Environment Variables.

Also see the question regarding environment variables that have effect on Sylpheed.

Yes. In Configuration->Common preferences..., under the Display tab.

In Configuration->Common preferences... under the Display tab, you can press the button Set display item of summary.... That pops up a screen with all the options you can show or leave out of the message list.

Under UNIX, you can directly edit the appropriate hidden setting stored in the $HOME/.sylpheed-2.0/sylpheedrc configuration file by changing the setting value to 0, or 1, respectively (default is on, i.e. 1):

enable_rules_hint=0

The above does not work under Windows, however, so you have to edit the C:\Program Files\Sylpheed\share\themes\MS-Windows\gtk-2.0\gtkrc file and set the following setting to 1, or 0, respectively (default is off under Windows, i.e. 0):

GtkTreeView::allow-rules = 1

You can. In Configuration->Common preferences, under the Details and External commands tabs, you can define your editor of choice. Remember, if you want to use a command line editor like vi or emacs, to write the name of the shell (term, term, rxvt) with the -e parameter in front of the editor. E.g.: rxvt -e vi %s.

Also, make sure that you have checked Automatically launch the external editor in Common preferences->Compose->Editor, if you want the editor of your choice to be launched every time you begin composing a message.

You can set the GTK+ font by $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0, or $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0.mine, (which is included by $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0). For example:

style "default" {
       font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1 "
}
widget_class "*" style "default"

In Configuration->Common preferences..., there is a checkbox Save sent message to outbox. Uncheck it, and it's solved.

Unlike Sylpheed 1.x, Sylpheed 2.x and 3.x doesn't allow direct modification of the menu shortcuts by default. Nevertheless, you can use the following methods to configure them:

After that, the key binding change itself is very simple. Suppose you want to assign a shortcut key to a function, e.g. sending all mail out should start when you press Ctrl-Y. Click the Message menu and move the mouse over Send all messages. Now you press Ctrl-Y. Immediately the menu text is updated and the function is in place. Please note that a previous function that Ctrl-Y was assigned to, will no longer have a shortcut key. If you want to remove the key binding, do the same thing, but press the Delete key on the menu item. Then the key binding is removed.

Also see Configuration->Common preferences...->Details->Interface+Set key bindings... where you are able to reset the Default key bindings, or use other predefined key bindings.

Of course! Not all windows, but by pressing Escape, you can close the address book, the window of viewing a mail source (View->Message source), the window of viewing the headers, and several others. Just give it a try and you will find all of them.

As of 0.4.65 you can. The options are:

     %y = year in numbers     %m = month in number
     %d = day in numbers      %c = date/time for locale
     %A = full weekday name   %a = short month name
     %B = full month name     %b = short month name
     %H = hours in 24-clock   %I = hours in 12-clock

For more information, go to the Configuration->Common preferences->Display->General and choose the ... labeled button. For more options, see man 3 strftime.

You need to enable displaying of the header pane in the general preferences.

You may not have compiled in Compface support. See the appropriate question in the Installation and Configuration section.

You need to double click the URL. Also, check that you have configured your web browser correctly in Configuration->Common preferences...-> Details->External commands.

When you try to launch a helper application, like an image viewer, with an attachment that has spaces in the name, put quotes around the %s parameter. Example: gedit '%s'

Under Windows, if you have created e.g. a simple batch file to echo a line to be included in your dynamic signature, you need to execute the command (specified under Account preferences->Compose->Signature+Command output) using either forward slashes or double backslashes for paths, for example:

cmd /c 'c:\\signature.bat'

Note that it is also recommended to enclose paths with single quotes, as is illustrated above.

Open Configuration->Preferences for current account...->Compose. There you can check the Bcc checkbox and optionally enter an email address.

Go to View->Customize toolbar... and select items from the Available items list to be displayed on the toolbar. You can modify the order by using the Up or Down button. The customization dialog also offers you to revert your modifications to default.

Go to Configuration->Common preferences...->Details->Interface, and select Always open messages in summary when selected.

Very often, when you are subscribed to a mailing list, you will store each message from that list in a folder dedicated to that list. Depending on remote software solution and configuration, mailing lists tend to include some words in the Subject header to identify the messages, optionally accompanied with a message number, for instance [sylpheed:33101]. These additions do not provide useful info if you have organized your folders as described, but Sylpheed allows you to disable displaying the additions in summary, and/or, if you wish, delete the additions on reply.

To do that, right-click on a folder from the folder tree, and select Properties... In the Folder properties dialog, check Don't display [...] or (...) at the beginning of subject in summary, or Delete [...] or (...) at the beginning of subject on reply, respectively.