Balsa 1.0: Mail in the GNOME Environment

By: Michael Hall
Monday, December 11, 2000 01:21:25 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/2762/1/

An Update

For a long while, GNOME-specific mail clients seemingly languished in varying states of completion. Though Balsa has been labelled the official GNOME mailer, there's a long list of candidates that integrate with GNOME with varying degrees of success and offer a collection of features that are pretty nice, even though there are some unfortunate shortcomings in individual clients.

Evolution remains the 800-pound gorilla, but it isn't done yet, and it may be overkill for many when completed since it not only provides a very complete mailer, but calendar and contact management as well. To that extent, it isn't appropriate to write off some of the smaller projects still making progress toward a goal similar to what kmail provides in the KDE environment: a basic, easy-to-use, light-weight GUI mail client.

Balsa seemingly stalled for a while, but development picked up this year and the team has produced version 1.0 of the project. The quick version of this review is as follows:

Balsa is stable, configurable, and integrates well with the overall GNOME environment. It's very easy to use and configure, and if there's any feature that I'd complain about missing, it's the as-yet-to-be-completed filtering tools, which would give the project parity with kmail, Netscape Messenger, and others.

Getting Balsa

Building from source is a simple process provided a current set of GNOME development libraries are available. Since Balsa includes a spell-checking component, you should also have ispell and pspell on your system. Though Balsa isn't included as part of the Helix Code GNOME desktop, current libraries from Helix Code will do the trick.

If you decide build from source, you should also be aware that though Balsa works well with a default configuration, there are a few features still tagged as optional or experimental. In particular, if you want to be able to read HTML mail, you should include --enable-gtkhtml when running the configure script. For LDAP support, include --enable-ldap. All current features, whether completed or not, can be enabled with --enable-all. This way you can get a look at the filtering configuration, even though this feature isn't done and won't work.

Running Balsa

When you launch Balsa for the first time, a GNOME configuration Druid appears. This provides an easy-to-use set of configuration options. Unlike some other Linux mail programs, Balsa will default to ~/mail instead of ~/Mail. If you're moving to Balsa from another mail client and have a set of preexisting mail files elsewhere, this is an important thing to keep in mind. Balsa also sets up specific inbox, outbox, trash, and sentbox folders. Other options in the Druid include setting your mail address and SMTP host.

In addition to the basic configuration the Druid offers, Balsa has a wide variety of configurable options from within the program itself. It's possible to add POP accounts, set which headers you can see when displaying a message, adjust how messages are colorized for attribution when displayed, and add address books.

The address book feature is welcome, because it allows users to link directly to their GNOME Card address book. Balsa allows aliases to auto-expand when entering a recipient in the 'To' field of a new mail, as well. By right-clicking on the index entry of a message, addresses can be added directly to the default address book. This tie-in with a standard GNOME desktop app is very helpful and gives Balsa an edge over some other clients that have decided to go their own way and maintain an address book of their own.

Among the other things Balsa brings to the table are, if you've enabled it, display of HTML mail. It's not the most popular feature in the world among many, but if you're working a job where you just get a lot of HTML mail or have friends and relatives you can't break of the habit, it's a nice feature to have enabled. For multipart mails with a HTML component, Balsa defaults to the plain text version, you can click on an HTML icon at the bottom of the message to see the HTML version rendered.

Balsa can also render graphical attachments. Again, it defaults to showing an attachment icon, but clicking on the icon presents the image without resorting to an external viewer.

Because it's fully tied into the broader GNOME environment, Balsa can handle additional MIME types as they're added from the GNOME control center, providing a unified set of document handlers. If you've set Applix to edit .doc files from MS Word under GNOME Midnight Commander, for instance, this will apply to Balsa as well.

Balsa also has a set of command line options that make it more customizable at launch. If you run several instances of the GNOME mailcheck applet to keep an eye on several different mailboxes, each can be configured with a different launch command for Balsa to open that specific box on being clicked. This is done with the command balsa --open-mailbox=foo. Through command line options, Balsa can also be configured to launch a composer window by using the command balsa --compose=foo@bar.net.

Printing messages allows Balsa to show off one of the nicer features of the GNOME print module. The print preview display is very clean and very scalable. Options include printing Postscript directly to the printer, writing a Postscript file to disk, or outputting to PDF.

In addition to the basic GUI point-n-click functionality, Balsa has reasonably intuitive keyboard shortcuts, though it isn't possible at this point to live without the mouse.

Finally, Balsa comes with good, illustrated documentation under the Help menu, tied into the general GNOME Help browser. Among other things, this shows how to set up IMAP folders as the primary folders for Balsa, which is a useful trick (even though it isn't point-n-click simple to pull off.)

Filters On the Horizon

Though Balsa is stable and ready for use as a general purpose mail client, there are still a few features in the wings. The most important is likely to be robust filtering.

It looks as if the Balsa filter feature, for instance, will provide a flexible set of tools for GUI configuration. Filtering can be compiled in with a configure switch, but the current filter configuration tool appears to be a non-functioning mock-up in the 1.0 release.

When it's done, Balsa filtering will allow for not only simple matches, but more complex regular expressions. A variety of actions will be allowed as well, including running specific programs, playing sounds, dumping messages into the trash, copying/moving messages to specific folders, or printing them directly. Filters will also be configurable to react to incoming, or outgoing mail, or being run on demand.

In the meantime, Balsa plays very nicely with existing mail filter setups the user may have already implemented. I used it for a week simply pointing it at the directory where procmail sorts all my messages into mbox files and had no complaints at all. Procmail and Balsa work well together, especially if Balsa is set to automatically update each mail box on launch and at a set interval.

Balsa's a good, basic GUI client. It's biggest strengths are its ease of use and how well it integrates with GNOME on the whole. The lack of native filtering is a shortcoming it's impossible to ignore, but it looks like the infrastructure is in place to handle this task. Meanwhile, the program's very stable and very usable. If you're looking for a basic GNOME mailer, Balsa's for you.