Balsa 1.0: Mail in the GNOME Environment
An Update
Michael Hall
Monday, December 11, 2000 01:21:25 PM
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
Balsa is available from the project download page as
a source tarball, source RPM, or RPM package. Links are included to a
Debian package and the latest Slackware .tgz.
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.
Next: Running Balsa »
