The appearance of the Sylpheed windows is controlled by
a Gtk+ theme (as Sylpheed is based on the Gtk+ toolkit).
Read the Gtk+ or your distribution documentation to find
how to change the Gtk+ theme.
The folder view shows you all the mail folders that you have created,
in a tree-like structure. If you want to see the headers of the messages
in a specific folder, just click the name of the folder once, and in the
summary view (2) you can see the messages in the selected mail folder.
When you see a + sign in front of a folder name, that means the folder
branch of that part of the tree is 'collapsed'. You can expand that
part by clicking the + sign. In that same manner you can also collapse
the - sign in front of an expanded branch of the folder tree.
The folder pane can be resized be dragging (left mouse button down)
the handle found on the left of the folder view.
The folder window can be detached from the main Sylpheed window
by selecting the menu action: View -> Separate folder tree.
When exiting the current state of the folder window (attached or
detached) is saved to be restored when re-starting Sylpheed.
To re-attach the folder window, de-select the menu entry.
The summary pane can show you many things. You can select what you
want to see from the Summary menu, selecting the option
"Set display item". A list of all options is:
If you think the size of a column is not right, you can adjust that
by placing the mouse cursor next to the button of the column you
want to adjust, press mousebutton1 (left button) and drag the
column to the width you want it to have.
Select a message by clicking on it with the mouse. Once the summary
pane has the focus of the program, you can also move up and down
in the list through the cursor keys, or pressing "p"(revious) and
"n"(ext) as in Pine.
In the message view you can read the message that you selected in
the summary pane. If you entered the summary pane without selecting
a message, the message view will be empty. At the top of the
message view some info is presented about the message you are
reading, as well as some statistics on the selected folder.
You can scroll up and down in the message by using the arrow keys
(after clicking inside the message), or by using the scrollbar.
The size of the message and summary views can be adjusted by dragging
(with the left mouse button down) the handle that appears between
the two panes.
The small arrow located just below the summary pane scrollbar can
be used to detach the message view. When clicked, the summary view
is extended down to the bottom of the Sylpheed window, and the messages
are displayed is a separate window (when you double click them in the
summary pane). This state is not saved on exit, and the message window
can be restored below the summary one by clicking again the small arrow.
When the current message contains attachments, two tabs
are displayed in the message window. Selecting the first one makes
the message window display the text body of the message, while selecting
the second tab makes the message window display the attachment part
of the message. In the latter case, the message window is splitted
in two parts, the top one contains the attachments as a tree
with the MIME type, size and file name of each part, while the bottom
part contains the content of the selected attachment (if the attachment
is an image and Sylpheed has been compiled with the gdk-pixbuf or
the imlib library).