At 01:59 AM 2/9/2003 +0100, you wrote:
Balsa: Gnome Intergration:> I can post a review I had of it from a very long time ago (2001 April/May > issue) in an issue of Maximum Linux (a now defunct magazine). If anyone is > interested that is, contact me offlist or post it to the list.Please share with us /Anders
Balsa is an email client specifically tailored to the Gnome Desktop environment. It was started virtually as soon as Gnome was released & continued to develop into what it is today. Balsa had a rather long developmental lull period (almost one year) but has recently been more actively developed. At press time, Balsa 1.0 (April/May of 2001) was the latest release.
The old Linux saying "There is more than one way to do it" or TIMTOWTDI, seems very applicable to Balsa. With the exception of the preferences dialog, Balsa has a nice clean user interface. But it is not always obvious how to accomplish certain things. For example, in order to get a nested folder hierarchy, you must physically create a directory in your mail directory (/home/username/mail by default) and then move the mailboxes you want into that directory. The fact that this tip is clearly documented in the FAQ document suggests to us that Balsa needs to develop better methods for doing many common tasks.
One of the big Balsa pluses is the integration between the Gnome Card & Balsa's address book. Balsa can read & write e-mail addresses to the Gnome card Address file. Additionally, Balsa can use an LDAP address book-giving corp. or educational users easy access to the main e-mail directory system w/out jumping through a lot of hoops. The downside of this is that most pre-packaged versions of Balsa (Like RPM or Debian packages) do not have LDAP support built in, leaving the user or Sys Admin to download the source and compile it with LDAP enabled.
One major thing we found sorely missing from Balsa is mail filtering. Development of mail filters is actively ongoing, much like the development of Balsa in general. However the current lack of built-in filter may be a problem for some POP3 users. Don't let this stop you. If you try Balsa and like it, we have the solution to this temp prob: If you have a POP3 acct, use fetchmail to download your mail from the mail server. Then use procmail to perform all your filtering into local mailbox files, which Balsa will then proceed to check. You can find out more info about fetchmail & procmail from their respective MAN pages.
Conclusion:
Balsa is a very nice e-mail client that is currently in active development for the Gnome desktop. However, Balsa can do with some user interface improvements in the areas of account creation, folder hierarchy & preferences options. Once these issues are addressed & mail filtering has been added, Balsa will become a damn good alternative.
Highs:
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Integration with Gnome, Easy to use, HTML support, LDAP support & IMAP support.
Lows:
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Must recompile for LDAP support, UI bugs, Mail account creation not obvious, No filters (in progress).
Required:
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Any Linux distro, GTK and Gnome Libs.
This article was dated April/May of 2001
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FemmeFatale
Good Decisions You boss Made:
"We'll do as you suggest and go with Linux. I've always liked that
character from Peanuts."
- Source: Dilbert
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