I’ve been prodded a few times into looking at Sylpheed - and now this review of the new release on linux.com may have pushed me over to the dark side. It’s a mail client that’s designed using the GTK+ libs, which is good for me - I’m a (nearly) card-carrying Gnome Junkie. I last looked at Sylpheed about 12 months ago, and when I did, it was ugly! I think it was using the original GTK libraries, which makes for some good speed (apparrently, I’ve never seen it) and it was pretty clunky. Looking at the screenshots from the site, and the information in the review, I’ve decided to see how it goes, replacing Evolution as my mail client. I’ve been using Evolution for quite a while now, ever since converting from Windows as my main desktop OS, where I was using Thunderbird (and before that, Outlook 2000) The main reason I’m looking away from Evolution is the fact that it seems to get slower and slower every time I want to use it - and the only explanation I can come to for that is its use of the file-per-folder mbox format for mail storage - and I have folders with thousands of pieces of mail in them at any time. There’s other reasons too - I don’t need a groupware program, just a mail client, and I’m trying to find something that’s a bit lighter on the memory usage as I’ll probably change from an overpowered desktop machine with pretty good specifications to a laptop with more conservative abilities soon.
So, when I’m done with work, it’ll be time to back up my home directory, and install Sylpheed, hopefully it’ll all go well! I’ll post some information on how I went as an update to this sometime later, when I’ve played with it for a while.