HowTo: Lightning Speed Big Claws

Who gets tired of Thunderbird and Evolution mail client software? How about, "You've Got Claws Mail!"

Do you want to try a new GTK+-based lightweight but heavy duty email client for linux?

Let's give Claws a shot.

What is Claws?

Claws Mail is an email client (and news reader), based on GTK+, which offers a lightweight, full featured, with wide array of email plugins for email clients. Claws provides quick interactive response, graceful, and sophisticated email client interface, grandma-type easy configuration, intuitive operation with abundant mail client features, mail extensibility, robustness and stability.

Claws' appearance and GUI interface are designed to be familiar to new users coming from other popular email clients, like Outlook users,Gmail users as well as experienced users. Almost all commands are accessible with the keyboard, just like the now popular GMail.

Email messages are managed in the standard MH format, which features fast access and data security. You'll be able to import your emails from almost any other email client, and export them just as easily how grandma does it.

Want more? Claws has lots of extra functionality, like an RSS aggregator, calendar, or laptop LED handling - these are provided by extra plugins.

Claws on Fedora
Yes, Fedora got it for you. Claws can easily be downloaded from Fedora repos using the old-timer Fedora rpm package installer called yum.

Claws Installation on Fedora

# yum -y install claws

Claws Plugins

Additionally, Claws supports a very wide array of mail client plugins. Some of these Claws plugins can be easily installed using yum and are listed below.

claws-mail-plugins-acpi-notifier.i386 : ACPI notification plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-attachwarner.i386 : attachment warner plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-att-remover.i386 : Attachments remover plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-bogofilter.i386 : Bogofilter plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-cachesaver.i386 : A cache saving plugin
claws-mail-plugins-clamav.i386 : Clamav antivirus plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-dillo.i386 : Dillo HTML viewer plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-fetchinfo.i386 : Inserts headers containing some download information
claws-mail-plugins-gtkhtml2-viewer.i386 : GTK Html Viewer
claws-mail-plugins.i386 : Additional plugins for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-mailmbox.i386 : Support for mailboxes in mbox format
claws-mail-plugins-newmail.i386 : Write a msg header summary to a log file
claws-mail-plugins-notification.i386 : New mail notifications
claws-mail-plugins-pdfviewer.i386 : PDF Viewer plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-perl.i386 : Extended filtering engine
claws-mail-plugins-pgp.i386 : PGP plugin for signing and encrypting mail
claws-mail-plugins-rssyl.i386 : RSS plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-smime.i386 : S/MIME signed and/or encrypted
claws-mail-plugins-spamassassin.i386 : Spamassassin plugin for claws-mail
claws-mail-plugins-spam-report.i386 : Report spam mail to various places
claws-mail-plugins-synce.i386 : Keeping the addressbook of a Windows CE device in sync
claws-mail-plugins-tnef.i386 : Tnef message parsing
claws-mail-plugins-vcalendar.i386 : vCalendar message handling

To install all of the above Claws plugins, simply
# yum -y install claws-mail-plugins*

Claws is fast and is convincing as an alternative linux mail client. You should try it, its pretty neat and very easy to get along with, no to mention a lot of plugins available for mail feature extensibility.

Claws Screenshot