Since I have multiple gmail accounts, some for work and others for personal, I often find myself juggling my email from one account to another. The easiest way is to rely on IMAP. 

 Image Source: Data Sciences

You right-click and then move messages from one account to another. The approach has worked for me for years. I often rely on Thunderbird Mail to get the job done when I’m on Mac or Windows machines. 

Will the Small, Fast, Email App Step Forward?

One pain of running on a small GNU/Linux install is not having a lot of room. Of course, that’s the benefit, too, since the system works fast. In the past, I’ve tried running Sylpheed or Claws-Mail as an alternative to Thunderbird Mail (which works great but can be a bit of a juggernaut on a small system). 

Gmail IMAP Settings

Neither Sylpheed or Claws-Mail impressed me in the past…probably because I wasn’t smart enough to get them configured to work with multiple Gmail accounts.

Tonight, I thought I’d give Sylpheed and Claws-Mail another run. Wow, what an improvement for both, but Sylpheed wins, hands-down. Why? Speed and size. 

First, I installed Sylpheed. That was a quick installation and with the chart above, I was able to get it working as I hoped. And, wow, what a fast email program. It popped up quick when I started it, either from command line or menu.It allowed me to save my mail files on an external drive, which was great and helps save space on my small XFCE4 GNU/Linux volume.

Second, I setup Claws-Mail. It works OK, but took like 12 seconds to start up. I purged it from the system. Too slow.

So, Sylpheed is the winner. I may give it a try on Windows, since it works there as well. Again, I don’t use it for email viewing, but more to shuffle emails from one account to another. 

Update: Wow, Thunderbird was taking up a few gigs of space (3.9, to be exact) on my Windows installation. I removed it and installed Sylpheed for Windows. Amazing, it dropped the size down to 30 megs). Pretty incredible savings to go from 3.9gigs to 30 megs.

Sylpheed website