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Sylpheed-Claws

For the official home page: Sylpheed-Claws

Sylpheed-Claws is a great e-mail program for Linux (in fact there is a Windows port too). It is derived from Sylpheed by Hiroyuki Yamamoto, and contains the 'bleeding edge' features, but is in fact very stable and is regularly synced with Sylpheed.

It has all the usual e-mail features (IMAP, POP) etc, but also sports some really powerful extras, such as:

• Actions: use external programs in a whole variety of ways. One of my favorite is the ability to convert lots of types of attachments to plain text, and bring the result back into the e-mail window. This means I can very quickly view Word documents right within my e-mail program.
• Powerful filtering and processing capabilities
• Plugins for a variety of things, such as supporting different file formats for storing messages, viewing various attachments inline, and using of external spam filters etc.

I was a developer on the team, and mainly was involved in doing bug fixes and various miscellaneous user interface enhancements. Another of my small contributions was a script that can be used with the actions feature, textviewer.sh. If you didn't get sylpheed-claws from the source tarball, you probably won't have it -- download it below instead.

Downloads

Go to the main Sylpheed-Claws page to get Sylpheed-Claws itself.

Textviewer.sh

Download textviewer.sh. This is provided without any warranty under the terms of the GPL.

This script attempts to determine the file type of a file, and then attempts to convert the file to text. It relies on a load of (optional) external programs to do the conversion. It works best with Sylpheed-Claws 0.9.8 and later.

You'll need these programs as well:

• unrtf to convert RTF files
• antiword to convert MS Word
• html2text to view HTML
• xlhtml and html2text for MS Excel
• ppthtml and html2text for Powerpoint files
• ooo2txt for basic extraction of OpenOffice Writer text
• pdftotext for PDF
• tar and gzip/bzip2 to list the contents of tarballs
• unzip to list the contents of zip files

In sylpheed, use an action like this:

textviewer.sh %p |

Assign a good shortcut (such as Shift-T), and you can now very quickly view lots of attachments inline as plain text.

Debian_advisory_check.sh

Download debian_advisory_check.sh. This is provided without any warranty under the terms of the GPL.

This is a simple script you might find useful if you use Debian, are subscribed to the Debian advisory e-mail list, and use Sylpheed-Claws.

To use it, it's best to filter the Debian advisories into their own folder. Then set a processing rule on that folder:

Condition: unread & test "debian_advisory_check.sh %F"

Action: color 2

When a new e-mail arrives in that folder (which you'll see cause it will be bold) clicking on the folder will cause all new e-mails to be checked. If the e-mail is to do with a package installed on your system, it will be coloured red.