It supports * local mailboxes in maildir, mbox and/or mh format, * nested mailboxes, * protocols POP3, IMAP and SMTP, * multithreaded mail retrieval, * GnuPG/GPG encryption, LDAP, Kerberos and SSL, * MIME (view images, save parts), * multiple character sets, * GPE address book, * printing and spell-checking. Balsa is an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment, but it can also be used standalone though it may print some error messages then.

For help on using Balsa, see the documentation in its help menu using Yelp Gnome 2 help/documentation browser.

This man page tells about the options of the 'balsa' command, which is used to start Balsa.

When you start Balsa from the command line of an (x)terminal, not only can you use the command line options described below, any error messages are printed to that terminal too (whether you execute that command in the background or not).

-? , --help

Displays a message describing command line syntax of Balsa, giving many more options than are presented in this man page; Balsa exits immediately after that.

Some of these options work (and thus should be in this man page) for example --display , others may not - for example --disable-crash-dialog which is provided by GNOME GUI Library.

--version

Balsa prints its version and exits.

-c , --check-mail

Balsa starts and checks for new mail immediately.

-i , --open-inbox

Balsa starts and opens the Inbox.

-m email-address , --compose=email-address

When invoked with this option, Balsa will open its email-composer for a new message with the specified address in the To: field.

The email-address parameter can be specified as user@host, e.g. , or in URL format, e.g. "Balsa List < balsa-list@gnome.org>" .

You can use Balsa as mailto protocol handler by, in the URL handlers section of the GNOME control center, setting the mailto protocol command to : balsa -m "%s"

-a FILENAME , --attach=FILENAME

When invoked with this option, Balsa will open its email-composer for a new message with the specified file already attached to the message.

Example : balsa -a ~/balsa-new.1.gz

-o MAILBOX, --open-mailbox=MAILBOX...

This makes FIBalsaFR start and open the specified mailbox. The mailbox should be specified by its full URL.

Example : balsa -o imap://user@mail.example.com/INBOX balsa -o file:///var/mail/user

-u , --open-unread-mailbox

Open all mailboxes that may contain unread messages.

-d , --debug-pop

Makes Balsa print the POP3 communication to stderr, including the full text of every message.

The former can be useful for debugging POP3 connections.

-D , --debug-imap

Makes Balsa print the IMAP communication to stderr.

This feature is useful for debugging IMAP problems.