Spruce

Spruce is a mail user agent, commonly known as an email client. It is an X11 mail user agent and has been written with the Gtk+ widget set, designed to be extremely small and fast. It possesses all the essential features of a user. Spruce supports Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), an Internet Standard for representing multipart and multimedia data in email. Additionally, Spruce enables you to save MIME objects to files.

Spruce's message composer does not have integral multimedia capability, but any data file type, including multimedia, can be attached to a text message and sent using MIME's encoding rules. This allows multiple individuals with MIME-capable email software, such as Spruce, Kmail, Pine, or various other programs, to exchange formatted documents, spreadsheets, image files, etc. via internet email.

At present, Spruce uses its SMTP interface to send mail. Future versions may support the ability to have an external program send messages. Spruce currently supports several forms of mail retrieval, including POP3, APOP, and POP with CRAM-MD5 Authentication, IMAP, which supports CRAM-MD5 Authentication, and mbox. mbox is the standard UNIX mail format typically found in the user's home directory: ~/mbox and/or in /var/spool/mail.

There are several key features of Spruce. It allows you to view, save, delete, expunge, print, copy/move between mailboxes, reply and forward emails, and compose messages in a simple editor with Word-wrap. Among the features is the functionality of adding text files to the editor to save composition time via a menu option. Furthermore, Spruce supports adding file attachments through a toolbar button. Easy manipulation of mailboxes and messages is possible using both menus and drag-and-drop technology. Additionally, it has an address book for keeping a list of long or frequently used addresses. Lastly, new mail checking is available at the press of a button or on a set timer.