Starting Sylpheed can be done by typing sylpheed on a prompt in a terminal and pressing Enter. You can also add Sylpheed to a menu in KDE or Gnome, or create a shortcut to it on the desktop, if your window manager allows that. When you first start Sylpheed, the program will ask you where you want to store the mails that you downloaded. You can accept the default ($HOME/Mail) or set up your own mail folder. Sylpheed will then load with it's default settings. The way to change these are written about further on in this manual.

Ending Sylpheed can be done in several ways: Select "quit" from the File menu. Press Ctrl-Q Click the "program close" button in the titlebar.