Sylpheed Saved My Life

I am constantly changing the bits of software I use to manage my life. I’m never really satisfied with any program I’m using, and since most don’t allow for extension I have to go searching for a new piece of software when my needs change. Being a programmer I’d much rather have something I can tweak easily.

I’ve never been satisfied with e-mail software mostly because they are so bad at filtering spam despite all the advancements in spam filter. It’s as if all of the major spam filter developers have passed the MUA developers on the freeway and are laughing at them and throwing beer cans. “Your windows suck Evolution!” “What’s wrong iMail? Can’t block that Cialis spam?” “You suck Outlook! >ding<”

None of the MUAs out there I’ve used make it easy to hook in a decent spam filter. There must be 200 spam filters and maybe 10 active MUAs, and the only ones that have any filter hooks are text mode clients that require you to understand procmail wizardry.

In the end you’re either stuck using a powerful text mode client like Mutt with it’s Everest scale learning curve, or you use some graphical thing like Evolution, iMail, or Outlook and suffer through penis enlargement forestry.

The Mongrel Spam Storm

The Mongrel mailing list gets tons of spam, and then I get tons more since I’m the moderator, and then I get even more since Mongrel is damn popular and everyone puts my e-mail address on their blogs and the stupid rubyforge archives are wide open.

I haven’t seen this much spam since I lived on Guam and the car dealership there started offering 50lb bags of rice and cases of SPAM with every purchase. I’m not kidding, they give out SPAM there when you buy a car, or they did when I was a kid.

Once Mongrel became popular I was screwed. I didn’t have an issue with spam until then because my hosting provider runs spamassassin. The spam was maybe about 3 e-mails a day which is not that annoying. I could use any MUA I wanted, so I typically just used iMail on my mac mini or Evolution. Even though Evolution constantly crashes and iMail’s filtering capabilities are pathetic, I was pretty happy.

I tried to get Evolution to do this but that was impossible. It was time to find a new solution that had more powerful filtering, started up quicker, and let me go through my many mailing lists much faster.

The Adventures of Mutt and Sylpheed

I started checking out Mutt first. I sometimes used Mutt to read my e-mail over ssh at some companies, and I liked the key bindings. It was possible with Mutt to rip through threads and messages as they came in using only a few keys. Replying to an e-mail took more keystrokes than reading everything in a mailing list. It was fast, reasonably easy to use, and very configurable.

The problem with Mutt is that once you try to do more advanced stuff or need to review graphics it turns ugly. You’re editing procmail scripts and hacking up weird macro languages. Also I really really like the three pane view and graphics. Then trying to add a spam filter just got even more disgusting (did I mention I hate procmail?).

So Mutt was out of the question, but I remembered this funky client I used called Sylpheed. Sylpheed was great for this small laptop I owned at the time. Sylpheed loaded quick, looked decent, ran fast as hell, searched quick, and didn’t crash. The docs were ultra thin since the author was Japanese, but it worked well enough.

After looking around for other options I gave the new Sylpheed a spin, and wow had it improved. Sylpheed is basically a easier to configure graphical Mutt. You can rip through your e-mail with just keys, but you also have powerful sorting and spam filtering without procmail. Sure you could use procmail if you wanted, but with the included filters you mostly didn’t need it. Not to mention nice readable fonts, actually viewing images, and clicking on links to open a browser.

Favorite Features

I think my very top favorite feature of Sylpheed is that it starts instantly and never crashes. That’s to be expected since (unlike Evolution) it doesn’t have twenty other applications in it at once. It just does e-mail and NNTP. It even hangs out in my system tray so I can pop over to my e-mail when I need.

This speed may seem insignificant, but it’s a big deal when you’re like me and on about 20 mailing lists and must jump between them all to read and contribute. Because Sylpheed is so fast I can rip through my e-mail like nothing, even jumping across folders and searching all my messages is quick. Insanely quick. Like sometimes I have to double check that something actually happened.

Yet there’s quite a few other features that make Sylpheed hot to use if you’re a programmer and bound to the keyboard all day. Here’s a condensed list of what I do with Sylpheed on a regular basis.

Simple To Configure

Just about everything is configurable, but the defaults are very reasonable. You can even change the default key bindings to match the Mutt bindings if you like those. You can use any other spam filter program you want. You can change layout, how the tray works, whether to use SSL, everything. Yet, it’s still very easy to configure, unlike Evolution which has tons of crap configurable, but you can never figure out how to do it.

Intense Spam Protection and Filtering

I think Sylpheed is the first MUA that filters my e-mail the way I expect e-mail to be filtered and it does it instantly. The filtering is simple to setup, exact, and messages seem to land where I thought they would. For example, I’ve got it setup so that Mongrel mailing list messages go to a mongrel folder, and then under that folder is mongrel-inbox for messages people send me about Mongrel, but to my Inbox. That’s a pain to setup in iMail or Evolution.

It comes ready to work with bogofilter too, and after maybe 30 minutes of training on my huge already existing spam set it is probably at 99% accuracy. I went from about 20-30 spam messages in my inbox per day to one spam last week. I had maybe 3 false positives, but Sylpheed filters them into a Junk folder and flags them as new, so I didn’t miss anything.

If you don’t like bogofilter then Sylpheed can use anything that has an executable to do the tagging and filtering.

Message and Folder “Hyper Navigation”

What I liked most about Mutt is how you can zip through all your e-mail threads and clear them out using just keys. The problem in graphical MUAs is that they are slaves to the damn folder panel. When messages get sorted into a folder you have to actually click on the damn thing to see the messages. Some of these can use key sequences to move between folders, but they are either complicated or the client is so slow to open large folders that it’s almost useless.

Sylpheed has these great key bindings that let you roll through your new messages and mark threads quickly, but the best part is that they work across folders. When messages come in Sylpheed marks the ones with new messages in red. I then just hit ‘N’ from anywhere and it jumps to the next unread message in any folder. I keep hitting N and I can zip through the new messages, and when there are no more Sylpheed prompts me to ask if I want to continue to the next folder, which I can answer “YES” to by hitting ENTER on the keyboard.

This means that Sylpheed sits in my system tray as a little icon. When I notice there’s mail I open it, and just hit ‘NNNNN ENTER NNN ENTER …’ until I’ve gone through everything. Because Sylpheed is so damn fast this is almost instantaneous. What’s even better is a quick key sequence (ALT-mmt) and I can mark a whole thread as being read. This makes it quick to ignore threads that I’m not interested in, yet still catch messages I should pay attention to.

I’ll give you some quick stats. Under Evolution I would never read the rails and ruby mailing lists, let alone any other lists. When I stopped using Evolution I had about 22000 unread messages. Yes, “twenty-two-thousand” unread messages.

I’ve been using Sylpheed for a week and I’ve processed every message that’s come in. Since there is no spam thanks to bogofilter and since I can quickly type single characters to do all my e-mail reading and responding, I’m able to process everything. That’s the advantage a good set of key bindings can give you.

I went from 22k unread messages and 20-30 spam per day to 0 (zero) unread messages and 1 spam per week. That’s an incredible metric of efficiency.

Command Line Operation

I do quite a bit from the command line, so it’s annoying to be working on something and then have to e-mail someone an attachment by opening my MUA and clicking around.

Sylpheed can take command line arguments and start up new messages, check the mail, and do other processing. What I did is setup a few commands to simplify this further:

sendto frank@example.com thatthingisentyou.pdf

And the currently running Sylpheed will pop open a window all ready to go with the cursor placed right in the subject line. It now takes me two seconds to send out files to folks as I’m coding.

I’ve got similar commands for the other parts of Sylpheed like getting stats, starting grabbing, etc.

Getting Sylpheed

If you run any version of Linux then you can probably get it using your package management system. Make sure you get the latest one you can, or visit the author’s site (there’s information in English and other languages) and build from source.

You can download the source and get documentation at the main site.

It uses GTK so it might run on other platforms, but don’t quote me on that.

You should also install things like aspell for spell checking and bogofilter for the spam filtering.

The Sylpheed-claws Version

There’s also a Sylpheed-claws but they kind of forked off and are now doing their own thing that adds some bloat. The original Sylpheed is perfect but give the claws version a try if you need some of the extra features.