Balsa - an e-mail client for GNOME

Download GNOME 2 version

GNOME2 release - 2.0.9 - released on 2003.02.24

This release fixes two nasty deadlocks - update if you use 2.0.7 or 2.0.8 and experience random crashes or locks.

Download:

Balsa-2.0.9 is a quite mature GNOME2 port of balsa and has been used daily by many people. You may want to recompile balsa on your computer if you use different distribution. Try

rpmbuild --recompile balsa-2.0.?-1.src.rpm

Please note also that pspell distributed with RH8.0 makes balsa hang on fork() call, i.e. when any external program is to be forked from balsa. The solution is to remove -lc from dependency_libs in /usr/lib/libpspell.la.

Independent Packages
official Debian packages (download area).

For Balsa versions later than 1.1.5, you will need the libESMTP library. Get the sources from the home page or grab the RPM built on Redhat 7.3:

libESMTP packages
libesmtp-1.0-1.i386.rpm (89kB)
libesmtp-1.0-1.src.rpm (228kB)
Independent Packages
Slackware
official Debian packages (download area).

Download GNOME-1.4 version

Code that uses GNOME-1.4 libraries.
It will work both with GNOME-1.4 and GNOME-2 but balsa-2.0.x is the recommended version for the latter one.
balsa-1.4.2.tar.bz2 (2.3MB)
balsa-1.4.2.tar.gz (3.2MB)
Official Packages (released on 2002-12-22)
balsa-1.4.2-1.i386.rpm (1.5MB) built on RH7.3.
balsa-1.4.2-1_rh72-ximian.i386.rpm built on RH7.2 with Ximian Gnome (1.6M)
balsa-1.4.2-1.src.rpm (2.3MB)

The binary RPM is compiled on Redhat 7.3 with update packages. You may want to recompile Balsa to enable LDAP, SSL, GSS, which are disabled by default.

Requirements

Balsa requires a basic GNOME installation. Also make sure you have libtool and the libESMTP library installed.

Balsa 0.9.5 and greater uses the libpspell library for spell checking, which is available in both rpm and deb format as well as plain source. You can find the library and modules at the pspell website.

You may want to recompile Balsa to get: HTML support (--enable-gtkhtml), GSS support (--with-gss) or LDAP support (--enable-ldap). You will need corresponding development modules.


CVS source & build instructions

Balsa source is also available from the GNOME CVS repository. Check out balsa module. The CVS version is sometimes not sufficiently stable for everyday use it but has all the new features and is the best starting point if you want to hack Balsa.

You will need pspell-devel (required) and gnome-print-devel (optional) packages for building Balsa. Also get gnome-doc-tools or install the png-support-3.?.dtd and gdp-both.dsl files yourself. Most likely, it will be necessary to add to your /etc/sgml/docbook.cat (or whatever catalog file your db2html tool uses) a pointer to /usr/share/sgml/docbook/png-support-3.1/catalog! Also, make sure your have libtool installed.

If you get errors compiling Balsa help file balsa.sgml, make sure your SGML catalog file contains paths to relevant packages. The frequent error is to omit PNG support files which results in seemingly unrelated errors.