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