CISE Help & Resources
Sylpheed
Sylpheed is a good IMAP client, but can be somewhat confusing to set up. This is a step-by-step recipe for getting it working here at CISE.
Configuring Sylpheed for CISE Mail
- Start up the program by typing
sylpheed &
at the command line. Since sylpheed sometimes prints warnings to the screen that aren't terribly important, you may want to start it up like so:
sylpheed >& sylpheed.out &
and check the file if you have any problems.
- When you first start up sylpheed, you'll get dialog box asking for "the location of mailbox" . Here sylpheed is asking where you keep your MH mail. As you'll be using IMAP, you can click CANCEL for this box unless you'll be moving your old MH mail to IMAP. If so, add the mailbox "Mail" (the default), and your old MH mail will be displayed. You can remove the MH mailbox view later if you wish by right clicking on the mailbox in the folder view and selecting "Remove mailbox".
- Next, two boxes will pop up, one with "Add" , "Edit" , and
"Delete" buttons down the right side, and one with tabs for your mail settings.
First, you should enter information into the settings box.
- Basic
- Name of this account: CISE (click "Set as default")
- Full Name: Your name
- Mail address: USERNAME@cise.ufl.edu (replace USERNAME with your own)
- Organization: University of Florida CISE Department
- Protocal: IMAP4
- Server for receiving: imap.cise.ufl.edu
- SMTP Server: mail.cise.ufl.edu
- User id: USERNAME
- Receive
- "Get all" should already be selected by default -- leave it this way. Select if unselected.
- Send
- Typically, the defaults are ok. If you are offsite (outside of CISE) however, select "SMTP Authentication" and place your username in the "UserID" field". Entering your password here isn't recommended (you'll be prompted once per sylpheed session for your CISE password).
- Compose
- These settings are user-defined. You can select any of the fields and leave them blank to have them show up in the composer by default.
- SSL
- Receive: Select "Use SSL for IMAP4 connection" (required)
- Send: Select "Use STARTTLS..." (recommended, required for SMTP Auth)
- Advanced
- The defaults for this section should be ok
After you're finished, click "Ok". In the Accounts box, click "Set as default account if not already marked under the "D" column. You can then add other accounts if you wish following the same procedure above, and click "Close" when finished.
- Basic
- You can now read and send mail with sylpheed, but you may want to customize
the app further. If so, go to the Configuration menu and select "Common Preferences".
The following are recommendations unless otherwise specified.
- Receive
- External program: leave blank
- Local spool: *Deselect* "Incorporate from spool" (not necessary)
- Autocheck new mail: Select and set to every 5 (recommended) minutes
- Leave the next two boxes unselected
- If you wish to read News with sylpheed, we recommend you specify "0" as the max number of articles to download.
- Send: Keep defaults for this selection
- Compose: Keep defaults for this selection
- Quote
- Reply format: Leave as is
- Forward format: Change to
------- Forwarded Message ?d{Date: %d }?f{From: %f }?t{To: %t }?c{Cc: %c }?n{Newsgroups: %n }?s{Subject: %s } %M ------- End of Forwarded Message
- Display: Leave everything as the default except:
- Font: we recommend this font (feel free to pick another)
-miscum-ricondensed-*-*-120-*-*-c-*-iso8859-8
by selecting "..." -> fixed(misc) -> Ok - Date format: Change to
%m/%d%M
- Font: we recommend this font (feel free to pick another)
- Message: Keep defaults for this section
- Interface: Keep defaults except
- Select "Open first unread..."
- Set key bindings to "Old Sylpheed", otherwise Ctrl-A selects the entire message, rather than going to the beginning of line
- Other : Set as desired
- Receive
Other Tips:
- In addition to messages sent to the terminal, sylpheed keeps a log of
its own in ~/.sylpheed directory
~/.sylpheed/sylpheed.log
This file can grow large very quickly , so you may want to send it to /dev/null instead:
cd ~/.sylpheed rm sylpheed.log ln -s /dev/null ~/.sylpheed/sylpheed.log
This will be the default for new CISE accounts.
- When creating a new top level folder, right click on INBOX and select "Create New Folder" -- remember, top level folders in Courier are still subfolders of INBOX
- The "help" function doesn't appear to work properly, however, the manuals are in /usr/local/share/sylpheed .
- Sylpheed often keeps a cache of messages in ~/.sylpheed as well, resulting in two copies of the message in your home directory. To periodically clean out the cache, right click on the account name ("CISE") and select "Rescan Folder Tree" . Upon visiting the folder again, the cache will be cleaned out.
- To select multiple messages for deletion, moving, etc, you can click on
a message, and then Shift-Click on another to select the range of messages
between the two.
To select several individual messages that aren't contiguous, you can use Control-Click instead.