Balsa is an e-mail client for GNOME, highly configurable and incorporating all the features you would expect in a robust mail client.
Balsa has a graphical front end, support for MIME attachments incoming and outgoing, as well as directly supports POP3 and IMAP protocols. It also has a spell checker and direct support for PGP and GPG for encryption. It has some basic filtering capabilities, and natively supports several e-mail storage protocols. It also has some internationalization support, including Japanese fonts.
The Balsa message editor is simple, but competent for composing clean and properly formatted plain text messages.
Key Features
- Support for local mailbox formats: mbox, maildir, mh.
- Allows nested mailboxes.
- Support for POP3 and IMAP mail access protocols, including CRAM-MD5 and GSS authorization.
- Printing.
- Spell Checking.
- Multi-threaded mail retrieval (optional).
- MIME support (view images inline, save parts).
- Supports SMTP and/or use of local MTA, i.e. Sendmail.
- Address Book that integrates with GnomeCard.
- Highly configurable.
- Active, open development.
- Multiple character sets for composing and reading messages.
- Allows file attachments to outgoing messages.
- GPG/OpenPGP mail signing and encryption.
- Filters.
Website: pawsa.fedorapeople.org/balsa
Support: FAQ, Mailing List
Developer: Emmanuel Allaud, Peter Bloomfield, Albrecht Dreß, Carlos Morgado, Pawel Salek, Bart Visscher, and many others
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Balsa is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Graphical Email Clients | |
|---|---|
| Thunderbird | Popular free, cross-platform e-mail, RSS and newsgroup client |
| Kmail | Email component of Kontact |
| Sylpheed | Simple, lightweight client |
| Mailspring | New version of Nylas Mail |
| Claws Mail | Lightweight yet powerful and full-featured client |
| Evolution | Provides integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality |
| Geary | Mail client for GNOME written in Vala |
| Astroid | Lightweight and fast Mail User Agent |
| Balsa | Email client for GNOME |
| Also known as Pantheon Mail | |
| Dodo | Based on the command line email swiss-army-knife notmuch |
| Aerion | Standalone lightweight e-mail client inspired by Geary |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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