Sylpheed is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

e-mail client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

and

news client A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new ar ...

licensed under GNU GPL-2.0-or-later with the library part ''LibSylph'' under GNU LGPL-2.1-or-later. It provides easy configuration and an abundance of features. It stores mail in the

MH Message Handling System The MH Message Handling System is a free, open source e-mail client. It is different from almost all other mail reading systems in that, instead of a single program, it is made from several different programs which are designed to work from the com ...

. Sylpheed runs on

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

systems such as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Be ...

, and it is also usable on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

. It uses

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...

. In 2005, Sylpheed was forked to create Sylpheed-Claws, now known as Claws Mail."Sylpheed-Claws 1.0.0 unleashed!!"
18 January 2005. As of 2020, both projects continue to be developed independently. Sylpheed is the default mail client in

Lubuntu Lubuntu ( ) is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and uses the LXQt desktop environment in place of Ubuntu's GNOME desktop. Lubuntu was originally touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient", but n ...

Damn Small Linux Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a discontinued computer operating system for the x86 family of personal computers. It is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU GPL and other free and open source licenses. It was designed to run grap ...

and some flavours of

Puppy Linux Puppy Linux is an operating system and family of light-weight Linux distributions that focus on ease of use and minimal memory footprint. The entire system can be run from random-access memory (RAM) with current versions generally taking up abou ...

Features

Spam filtering

Sylpheed provides support for

spam filtering Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email ( false positives) as opposed t ...

using either

bogofilter Bogofilter is a mail filter that classifies e-mail as spam or ham (non-spam) by a statistical analysis of the message's header and content (body). The program is able to learn from the user's classifications and corrections. It was originally writ ...

or bsfilter, at the user's choice. Bsfilter is shipped with the Windows version of Sylpheed."Chapter 1. Sylpheed FAQ - General Information"
/ref>

Plug-ins

Sylpheed supports the development of plug-ins. As of February 2015, Sylpheed's website notes an attachment-tool plug-in, an automatic mail forwarding plug-in, and a plug-in for determining whether or not attachments are password-protected.
/ref>

Limitations

Sylpheed is unable to send HTML mail. This is intentional, since the developers consider HTML mail to be harmful. It is still possible to receive HTML mail using Sylpheed.

Password

The password is stored in

plaintext In cryptography, plaintext usually means unencrypted information pending input into cryptographic algorithms, usually encryption algorithms. This usually refers to data that is transmitted or stored unencrypted. Overview With the advent of com ...

in the Sylpheed configuration file, which by default is only readable by "owner" and not by "group" nor "other". A feature called "master password" prevents Sylpheed from holding plaintext passwords, but does not protect stored messages from other local users with administrator privilege.

Encryption

Sylpheed includes natively PGP Sign and PGP Encrypt options in the compose window (which requires however an encryption tool based on PGP already installed on the computer). This function is simple to handle yet not intuitive to set up.

References

External links

*
Sylpheed documentation projectSourceForge project page
Free software programmed in C Email clients that use GTK GNOME Applications Free email software Email client software for Linux Windows email clients MacOS email clients Usenet clients {{network-software-stub