Spruce is an X11 mail user agent (commonly known as an email client) written with the Gtk+ widget set. It is geared towards being extremely small and fast, supporting all the common features that users want or need without sacrificing usability or functionality. Spruce's basic feature set includes:

• View, Save, Delete, Expunge, Print, Copy/Move between mailboxes, Reply and Forward messages.
• Compose messages in a simple editor with word-wrap. Allows inserting text files into the editor to save composition time through a menu option. Supports adding file attachments via toolbar button.
• Easy manipulation of mailboxes and messages using both menus and drag-and-drop technology.
• Address book to keep a list of long or frequently used addresses.
• New mail checking at the press of a button or on a set timer.

Sample view of the Spruce Mailer showing off MIME Attachments and IMAP

Spruce supports MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), an Internet Standard for representing multipart and multimedia data in email. Spruce allows you to save MIME objects to files. Spruce's message composer does not currently have integral multimedia capability, but any type of data file (including multimedia) can be attached to a text message and sent using MIME's encoding rules. This allows any group of individuals with MIME-capable mail software (e.g. Spruce, Kmail, Pine, or many other programs) to exchange formatted documents, spreadsheets, image files, etc, via Internet email.

At the present time, spruce uses it's own SMTP interface to send mail. Future versions may support the ability to have an external program like Sendmail send messages as an alternative.

Spruce currently supports several different methods of mail retrieval. Currently supported are: POP (POP3, APOP, and POP with CRAM-MD5 Authentication), IMAP (also supports CRAM-MD5 Authentication) and mbox (mbox is the standard UNIX mail format. These mailboxes are commonly found in /var/spool/mail and/or in the user's home directory: ~/mbox).

The Spruce development team includes:

• Project Leader:      Jeffrey Stedfast
• Principal authors:   Jeffrey Stedfast, Kristoffer Brånemyr and Melissa Matthews
• Documentation:      Jeffrey Stedfast