Balsa is an email client that runs on Linux under the GNOME user interface system. Balsa has a graphical front end, support for MIME attachments coming and going, directly supports Post Office Protocol and Internet Message Access Protocol protocols. It has a spell checker and direct support for Pretty Good Privacy and GNU Privacy Guard 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 is actively being developed as of late 2004 with several stable versions available as well as the current development version.

It builds on top of these other open source packages, GNOME, Libtool, libESMTP, GNU Aspell, and gmime. It also can optionally use libgtkhtml for HTML rendering, libkrb5 for GSS, and openldap for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol functionality. For privacy, you can optionally configure it to use gpg-error and gpgme libraries.

Reviews indicate that Balsa is a typical state of the art email program with no particularly unique bells and whistles at this point. Because it is an open source project, this could obviously change in the near future. It might also be a good starting point for anyone wishing to create a customized Linux email client as it claims to be highly configurable.

=See also=

*List of email clients *Comparison of email clients

=External links=