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.