Balsa E-Mail Client 1.3.x ========================= See ChangeLog for the list of the recent changes and NEWS for highlights. Copyright (C) 1997-2002 Stuart Parmenter and others See 'COPYING' for licence information. See 'AUTHORS' for a list of contributors Authors: ------- See AUTHORS Website: ------- http://balsa.gnome.org/ Description: ----------- Balsa is an e-mail reader. This client is part of the GNOME desktop environment. It supports local mailboxes, POP3 and IMAP. Configuration: ------------- Balsa has a lot of options to its configure script; you should run './configure --help' to get an idea of them. More complete descriptions are here. --enable-all Will turn on some features that are less than stable, or unfinsished, such as filtering and spell-checking. This is really use-at-your-own-risk. --enable-pcre Enable Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE). The only reason one might to disable them is to reduce the list of dependencies. Otherwise, they provide only adventages. The most important is locale-awareness (ordinary RE libraries cannot distinguish word boundaries for non ISO-8859-1. --disable-more-warnings Balsa by default is very sensitive to compilation warnings which often mean simply programming or configuration errors. If you are sure this is not the case, or you cannot change your system setup use this option to compile the code and hope for the best. (some Solaris setups require this). --enable-threads Compile Balsa with threading for more responsiveness. This works very well and should be enabled if possible. --disable-system-install If specified, Balsa will not put files into the prefix of Gnome, but instead into the prefix of other Balsa files. This allows Balsa to be installed locally if you don't have the permissions to install into /usr or /usr/local or wherever Gnome lives. Balsa will be able to find all the files that it needs, but Gnome may not be able to locate certain resources such as balsa.desktop, balsa.soundlist, etc. --disable-flock Some OSes (like Solaris) are known to be not full BSD-compatible. You may want in such a case to disable flock mailbox locking and use fcntl/lockf functions instead. --enable-fcntl This enables alternative fcntl file locking scheme. This function is sometimes troublesome over NFS but is POSIX compatible. --with-gss[=/usr/kerberos] This enables GSSAPI Kerberos based authentication scheme. Specify the kerberos directory as the argument. --with-sasl Use Cyrus SASL library for POP/IMAP authentication instead of mutt's native code (in the future, the native code will most likely be phased out in favour of SASL library). Libraries: --------- Balsa uses libESMTP library available at http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/ The current version is available at http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/libesmtp-0.8.4.tar.bz2 or http://www.stafford.uklinux.net/libesmtp/libesmtp-0.8.4.tar.gz Note, that it the current version requires --enable-require-all-recipents option to the configure script. You can grab {i386,src}.rpm that has this option enabled from ftp://ftp.chbm.nu/pub/ (built on RH 6.2) or from http://www.theochem.kth.se/~pawsa/balsa/libesmtp-0.8.4-1.i386.rpm http://www.theochem.kth.se/~pawsa/balsa/libesmtp-0.8.4-1.src.rpm The binaries are compiled against gnome-libs-1.2.8, if you use older/newer libraries, you will need to recompile balsa from the source. Balsa also needs the pspell spell checking libraries. Make sure you have libtool installed (if you get some error messages during compilation or when running precompiled binaries saying that libtdl is missing it means you need to install just that package). Website: ------- Balsa CVS source comes with the Balsa website in the directory for balsa/website/. Read balsa/website/README and balsa/website/INSTALL for more information. If you retrieved this source as a tarball or RPM or deb, this directory probably won't exist. To get it, you need to go to .... Balsa CVS: --------- Balsa is hosted on the Gnome CVS servers. To get the latest source, get the module 'balsa' from the CVS root ':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'. Specifying the SMTP Server: -------------------------- when compiled to use libESMTP, the remote SMTP server details are configured on the Mail Servers tab of the Preferences dialogue box as follows:- Remote SMTP Server: Specify the domain name and optionally the port for of the SMTP server you use for submitting mail. Please note that the default port number is 587. The syntax is hostname[:port]. Port can be a decimal number or the name of the service as specified in /etc/services. Typically you can just set this to localhost:25. User: If the remote SMTP server requires authentication, enter your user name here. Note that the exact format depends on the MTA in use. For example, some systems expect a user name, others may require an email address. Pass Phrase: If the remote SMTP server requires authentication, enter your pass phrase here. Some systems refer to the pass phrase as a password. Limitations on the length of the pass phrase depend on the SMTP server. TLS extension in SMTP mail submission: -------------------------------------- If you have libESMTP 0.8.5{preX} there will be a box for entry of the client certificate's password. The client certificate should be stored in PEM format in the file $HOME/.authenticate/private/smtp-starttls.pem Both the certificate and the private key are stored in the same file. The permissions on the certificate file *must* be 0600 or 0400 otherwise libESMTP will ignore it. libESMTP 0.8.4 will establish an encrypted connection with servers supporting STARTTLS but there is no certificate support. If the remote SMTP server requires a certificate, you will have to set "Use TLS" to "Never". Note that libESMTP 0.8.5 will only negotiate a TLS connection. It will not use SSLv2 or SSLv3 which are subject to downgrade attacks. Help System: ----------- In order to compile the help files, you need to have the GNOME DocBook documentation system. Very good documentation can be found at: http://www.gnome.org/gdp/gdp-handbook/gettingstarted.html Balsa as mailto protocol handler: --------------------------------- Balsa can be used as mailto protocol handler. You have to edit the GNOME URL handlers and add mailto protocol with command balsa -m "%s". Mailbox locking: --------------- 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 (see for example http://www.washington.edu/pine/tech-notes/low-level.html#locking). 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. POP3 mail filtering: ------------------- 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: --------- cut here ---------------- :0H: * ^Subject:.*balsa mail/balsa-related-mail --------- cut here ---------------- It is recommended to read procmail(1) and procmailrc(1) for more real-life examples and syntax explanation. Alternative browsers: -------------------- Start from 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 Reporting Bugs: -------------- See http://balsa.gnome.org/bugs.html for instructions. Do not report bugs with GtkHTML - it is quite unstable. Patches are welcome. Known issues: ------------ * When dotlocking is not possible (Wrong access privilieges for the mailbox file) balsa will open mailbox for reading only. Verify that balsa can create dot file in the mailbox directory. Recommended access privileges to /var/spool/mail are rwxrwxrwxt (01777) * Some versions of libgnome is known to have bugs that lead to balsa crash on startup. Read for details http://mail.gnome.org/archives/balsa-list/2000-October/msg00101.html and make sure you have at least /usr/lib/libgnome.so.32.3.11. * Experimental gcc 2.96 distributed with RedHat 7.0 generates spurious warning messages. You have to configure balsa with --disable-more-warnings option. * Older versions of GtkText are buggy and use sometimes wide characters for single byte charsets: some european charsets may be displayed improperly. gtk+-1.2.8 seems to work OK. We had also some reports that turned out to be a problem with font server configuration. Newer versions have problems of their own (ugrh).
