Building Sylpheed for FreeBSD

Sylpheed is a GTK based mail user agent. It is a real gem: it is rich in features, yet it is fast and has a small footprint. I have also found it to be quite stable.

Sylpheed compiles nicely on FreeBSD without changes.

export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include"
export LIBS="-L/usr/local/lib"
./configure --enable-ssl --enable-jpilot

Yes! Yes! Yes! Sylpheed has apparently had a lot of activity since I last checked into it. The last time I built Sylpheed, it was version 0.9.10, but they are now up to 2.2.6 in a very short time. I'm building it as I write this. The cool thing, however, is that they appear to have a win32 version! That's right, I may finally be able to have a great mail client on my Windows workstations!

The FreeBSD ports maintainer for Sylpheed has been pretty good at keeping things up to date. The ports collection turns SSL on by default, but not JPilot. Grab the latest port version, set WITH_JPILOT, and make.


BTW, I will probably want to mess with the GnuPG support. It is the 21st century, I should probably start encrypting my email.