Balsa - Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Balsa cannot lock my INBOX under /var/spool/mail -- my INBOX is opened readonly.
I see many compilation warnings. Is Balsa broken?
Balsa refers some ldl libraries. What are they?
Does Balsa currently support IMAP?
How do I configure IMAP?
Does Balsa have an address book?
Does Balsa support filters?
Does Balsa support file attachments?
When I click a gif I see this message in the preview pane...
How do I nest mailboxes?
What libraries does Balsa require?
Why do I get "SMTP server problem: SMTP Server dropped connection"?
How can I continue postponed messages?
How can I perform a search on a mailbox?
How do I forward attachments?
How can I paste mail addresses into the To-Field? It always disappears!
Why can't I compile Balsa?
Why does Balsa defaults to the HTML-Part?
Is there any way to change the default browser that Balsa calls?
How do I reply to mailing lists?
How can I use Sendmail with Balsa?
Whats up with GnuPG/ PGP/ S/MIME support?
Balsa claims that my passphrase is incorrect!
How can I set Balsa as the default Gnome E-Mail client?
Why can't I find an answer for my question?
How can I modify my shortcuts?
Why does Balsa miswrap and misquote my replies?

Balsa cannot lock my INBOX under /var/spool/mail -- my INBOX is opened readonly.: Balsa uses flock+dotfile for mailbox file locking. It does not use fcntl (although it can be enabled) since this locking method is very fragile and often not portable.

Make sure that your spool directory has drwxrwxrwt (01777) access privileges. Presently, dotfile locking requires this unconditionally. In the future, we may relax this requirement and will allow you to shoot yourself in your leg.

I see many compilation warnings. Is Balsa broken?: It is really a problem with gcc. Upgrade gcc or configure Balsa with --disable-more-warnings.

Balsa refers some ldl libraries. What are they?: You need to install libtool package. Make sure it comes with header files (or install respective devel package) If you want to recompile Balsa.

Does Balsa currently support IMAP?: Yes, although it does not cover 100% of the capabilites offered by the protocol. We support CRAM-MD5 and GSS authorization methods. Currently not supported are features such as listing all IMAP folders on the server, or subscribing to new folders on the server.

How do I configure IMAP?: Right click on a blank area of the mailbox list. Click on add mailbox. Select IMAP, and click OK. From here simply fill in the server name, user name, password, and folder name, and click OK. Note that the folder name above is the name of the folder that you wish to subscribe to. You will have to KNOW this in advance, as Balsa cannot currently manage folders on the server. If you are not sure what folders you have, try adding "INBOX" for the first one, as this one always exists. :)

Does Balsa have an address book?: You can specify a GnomeCard address book of your choice for balsa to use. Go to Settings->Prefernces->Addressbooks->Add->VCard->YourVCardProgram name and choose "~/.gnome/GnomeCard.gcrd" as the File name. Balsa can also use LDAP to access a remote e-mail directory.

Does Balsa support filters?

Yes. You can set up filters which will match on any message header (even on user headers, eg like X-Mailer header), or on message body, on message date, message flag (read, replied, flagged...). Moreover you can use simple substring look up or full regular expression search. Each filter has an associated action: every message that matches the filter conditions can be either copied, moved, trashed.

You can also use the POP3 filtering backend based on procmail. When the respective POP3 'mailbox' has the 'filter' box checked, the downloaded mail is passed on to procmail which will use ~/.procmailrc file as its configuration, so you can share it between Balsa and fetchmail and get consistent behavior no matter you use Balsa or fetchmail for downloading.

Simple example ~/.procmailrc file:

:0H:
* ^Subject:.*balsa
mail/balsa-related-mail

It is recommended to read procmail(1) and procmailrc(1) for more real-life examples and syntax explanation.

Does Balsa support file attachments?: Yes. Balsa does support attachments. You can drag files from GNOME compliant file managers into the compose window or select them from a file selection box.

When I click on a jpg in Balsa it immediately displays the image for me in the preview pane. When I click a gif I see this message in the preview pane: No open or view action defined in GNOME MIME for this content type Content Type:application/octet-stream Filename: ./signups_day_week.gif: Basically, images should be sent with content type set to: image/jpeg or image/gif and so on. Content type application/octet-stream is just a binary data.

To make it a little easier (it saves a few steps, such as saving the file to disk then finding a viewer), in the Control Panel for Balsa, under Mime Types, find application/octet-stream - highlight it, select "Edit" and in the entry for View, put in "xv %f" (without the quotes). Any other quick graphic viewer will do. Now when you get a message as you've described, when you click on the image, you'll have a new button for the message saying "View part with xv %f" (or whatever viewer you've decided to use).

How do I nest mailboxes?: Easy as pie. Just create a directory under your "local mail directory", then move your mailbox files inside it. (If you move your inbox, outbox, sentbox, draftbox, or trash, you will need to hack your .balsarc to reflect the changes. Simply search and replace the old path to your mailbox with the new one.) In the process of autodetecting your mailboxes Balsa will recurse into the subdirectory and put the mailboxes in their own subdirectory.

What libraries does Balsa require?: (see the requirements section)

Why do I get "SMTP server problem: SMTP Server dropped connection"?: Balsa's default is to use the "submission" service on port 587. But most servers still use the SMTP protocol on port 25, so just put ":smtp" or ":25" behind the server, ie. "smtp.addcom.de:25".

How can I continue postponed messages?: Just go to the Draftbox, click on the message, and then click File->Continue.

How can I perform a search on a mailbox?: You have a dedicated dialog box which allows you to look for messages that contains a given substring either in the common headers (From, Subject, To, CC) or in the message body.

How do I forward attachments?: Right click the message you want to forward and choose Forward Attached instead of Forward Inline.

How can I paste mail addresses into the To-Field? It always disappears!: Press <RETURN> after pasting.

Why can't I compile Balsa?: Have you checked that there is a -dev or -devel version of all necessary libs? Configure will tell you the names of the missing libs.

Why does Balsa defaults to the HTML-Part?: A multipart/alternative message is ordered from least to most faithful rendering of the alternative versions of a document. A mail client is expected to select the highest quality versions of the document that it supports. If a text/html version is after the text/plain in multipart/alternative, then from the sender's perspective, the text/html is the higher quality version and Balsa is correct to select it. See RFC 2046.

Is there any way to change the default browser that Balsa calls?

Yes, there is. Start by checking settings in your Gnome Control Center. If your version of gnomecc does provide option to change the default browser, you will need to create a file named gnome-moz-remote in your .gnome directory. It should contain the following:

[Mozilla]
filename=/path/to/your/browser

One has to use the gconf editor to set the browser with more recent GNOME versions that use GConf. Run:

gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command 'mozilla "%s"'

By the way, you can similarly set balsa as the mailto handler:

gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command 'balsa -m "%s"'

How do I reply to mailing lists?: You should use the "Reply to group" feature by clicking on the button on the message menu.

How can I use Sendmail with Balsa?

There are ways to skin this cat:

Configure Balsa to use your local sendmail as a SMTP server
Compile Balsa with the --without-esmtp option.

Whats up with GnuPG/ PGP/ S/MIME support?: It is not yet supported but is planned for one of the next versions.

Balsa claims that my passphrase is incorrect!

This is more a feature than a bug, as all Gnome 2 applications, including seahorse and gpa, use utf-8 and will therefore reject this passphrase.

The solution (if you want to call it a solution ;-)) is changing the national characters in the passphrase to utf-8 plus a consistent setup of all Gnome 2 *and* terminal applications, i.e. to configure the terminal to use utf-8 (this is of course not necessary if you never use command line gpg, but *always* seahorse and/or gpa to e.g. encrypt real files). Some information about that is included in the FAQ's on Albrecht Dreß's balsa GPG page.

How can I set Balsa as the default Gnome E-Mail client?: Go to the Control-Center to the URL-Handler. There add a new Protocol "mailto"(without ":") and, as the handler "balsa -m".

Why can't I find the answer to my question?: Probably because it isn't a frequently asked question. Feel free to contact the Balsa mailing list with questions that aren't addressed on this page.

How can I add a shortcut?

Run

gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels true

There is also a bugzilla report discussing edition of keybindings.

Why does Balsa miswrap and misquote my replies?: Balsa and some other mailers, including Eudora, MacOS X's mailer, and Mozilla Thunderbird, use a protocol defined in RFC 3676 to indicate portions of the text in a message that can be reflowed or displayed as quoted. They do this by adding the "Format=Flowed" and "DelSP=Yes" parameters to the content-type header. Mail that is exchanged between "flowed-aware" mailers should be reflowed and quoted intelligently.
When you reply to a message sent by another mailer and quote the original, Balsa has no way to know whether the sender used line breaks to convey information. To avoid changing the meaning of the content, Balsa avoids changing the line breaks, except to break over-long lines. It does allow you to select part of the reply and reflow it, marking it as flowed, but that involves your judgment about what the sender meant.