It has been nearly two years now since I switched from Sylpheed to aerc as my daily driver for email.

While Sylpheed still is an awesome email client my switch was triggered by more heavy usage of a laptop than before and the discovery of usability problems I thought long solved like:

• very high resolution but applications either zoomed / scaled which results in less space than needed
• unwieldy mouse handling (touch pads suck)
• after disabling application zooming fonts and icons were barely readable

The default expectation of the wonderful aerc email client is the usage of abook as address book. Also most people seem to use calcurse for calendars. However what if we want to switch?

If you are using opera and sylpheed you might want to fire up sylpheed by clicking on a mailto link in the browser.

If you experience the error message bind: permission denied when you try to run Sylpheed on FreeBSD you most likely have the false permissions for /tmp and/or /var/tmp.

Download the latest tarball from the Sylpheed homepage and unpack it. Afterwards go into the source directory and execute the following commands: