Balsa is a lightweight
email client
An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email.
A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...
written in
C for the
GNOME desktop environment.
Balsa has a graphical front end, support for
MIME
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...
attachments coming and going, directly supports
POP3
In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common ...
and
IMAP
In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by .
IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...
protocols. It has a spell checker and direct support for
PGP and
GPG for encryption. It has some basic filtering capabilities, and natively supports several email storage protocols. It also has some internationalization support, including Japanese fonts.
It builds on top of these other open source packages:
GNOME,
libtool
In computer programming, GNU Libtool is a software development tool, part of the GNU build system, consisting of a shell script created to address the software portability problem when compiling shared libraries from source code.
It hides t ...
,
libESMTP,
aspell, and
gmime. It also can optionally use
libgtkhtml for HTML rendering,
libkrb5 for
GSS-API, and
openldap
OpenLDAP is a free, open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) developed by the OpenLDAP Project. It is released under its own BSD-style license called the OpenLDAP Public License.
LDAP is a platform-independ ...
for
LDAP
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory servi ...
functionality. It can optionally be configured to use
gpg-error and
gpgme libraries.
Balsa is packaged for a wide range of
Linux distributions, including Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Slackware and Ubuntu, as well as for FreeBSD.
See also
*
Comparison of email clients
The following tables compare general and technical features of notable email client programs.
General
Basic general information about the clients: creator/company, O/S, licence, & interface. Clients listed on a light purple background are no long ...
References
External links
*
Email client software for Linux
Free email software
Email clients that use GTK
Free software programmed in C
GNOME Applications
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