1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2 <section id="ch_intro">
3 <title>Introduction</title>
5 <section id="intro_what">
6 <title>What is Sylpheed-Claws</title>
8 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.
12 <section id="intro_whatnot">
13 <title>What Sylpheed-Claws is not</title>
15 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.
19 <section id="intro_features">
20 <title>Main features</title>
22 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, PGP (digital signatures). It supports plugins, customisable toolbars, a number of guards to prevent any data loss, spell checking, 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>.
26 <section id="intro_history">
27 <title>History of Sylpheed-Claws</title>
29 Sylpheed-Claws has existed since April 2001. The primary goal of Sylpheed-Claws was to be a test-bed for potentially new features of Sylpheed (<ulink url="http://sylpheed.good-day.net">http://sylpheed.good-day.net</ulink>), so that new features can be tested thoroughly without compromising Sylpheed's stability. Sylpheed-Claws developers synced regularly their codebase with Sylpheed's, and Sylpheed's author, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, took back the new features he liked once they were stabilised.
31 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 is now an entity of its own.