Sylpheed 3.0, Open Source E-mail And News Client, Released
Sylpheed is an open source e-mail and news client licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License). Sylpheed runs on Unix-like systems such as Linux or BSD as well as on Mac OS X and Windows. It uses GTK+.
The new stable version Sylpheed 3.0 (3.0-win32) has been released on 24 Feburary 2010, and is available for download here.
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It is the major update release since the release of 2.0, five years ago. Sylpheed 3.0 introduces multi-threading, plug-in system, refined address book, new setup dialog, performance improvements, and more.
Sylpheed stores mail in the MH (Message Handling) System. The MH Message Handling System is different from almost all other mail reading systems in that, instead of a single program, it is made from several different programs. Another difference is that rather than storing multiple messages in a single file, messages each have their own separate file in a special directory.
The performance of MH is very much dependent on the file system and other features of the operating system that it runs on. Every read of a message will require starting a separate program, a directory scan in a large directory and a file open before the data can even be accessed. On the other hand, mailbox formats such as mbox which use a single file often require insertion or removal of data in the middle of the file when messages are read or altered and this can be a very slow procedure. In these cases MH will be much faster.
With a modern file system designed for large directories and small files such as ReiserFS the performance of MH can be comparable to that of a database based mail storage system.
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