Balsa(1)

💌 NAME 💌

Balsa — the GNOME e-mail client. that's it, that's the girl 🫶

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so bestie, you can use Balsa to fetch, read, write and send e-mails. it's giving main character energy of your whole inbox 💅

she supports:

• local mailboxes in maildir, mbox and/or mh format
• nested mailboxes 🪆
• protocols POP3, IMAP and SMTP
• multithreaded mail retrieval (she multitasks, obviously) ⚡
• GnuPG/GPG encryption, LDAP, Kerberos and SSL
• MIME (view images, save parts) 🖼️
• multiple character sets 🌍
• vCard, GPE, and other address book formats
• printing and spell-checking 📝

Balsa is an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment, but she can also be used standalone — though she may print some error messages then 😭 no cap.

for help on using Balsa, see the documentation in its help menu using the Yelp Gnome help/documentation browser. yep, Yelp, she's helpful like that 🧚

this man page tells about the options of the balsa command, which is used to start Balsa. most of these options let you tell Balsa that when it starts it should immediately open a mailbox, or the composer, and things like that. lowkey convenient fr fr.

heads up bestie 👑 — when you start Balsa from the command line, 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). so she will literally tell you what's wrong, right there 💀

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🌈 SYNTAX 🌈

balsa [  -h | --help                               ]
      [  -v | --version                            ]
      [  -c | --check-mail                         ]
      [  -i | --open-inbox                         ]
      [( -m | --compose=)email-address             ]
      [( -a | --attach=)filename                   ]
      [( -o | --open-mailbox=)mailbox[:mailbox]... ]
      [  -u | --open-unread-mailbox                ]
      [  -s | --get-stats                          ]

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -h, --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. so if you want the full tea, ask her here ☕
• -v, --version — Balsa prints its version and exits. quick lil vibe check on which version you're running ✨
• -c, --check-mail — Balsa starts and checks for new mail immediately. no waiting, she's on it 📬
• -i, --open-inbox — Balsa starts and opens the Inbox. home sweet home 🏠
• -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. balsa-list@gnome.org, or in URL format, e.g. "Balsa List <balsa-list@gnome.org>". 🦋

Balsa also serves as the mailto protocol handler. iconic behaviour honestly.

• -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 Balsa start and open the specified mailbox. the mailbox should be specified by its full URL. don't be shy, give her the whole thing 💅

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. she's hunting down every unread bestie 🔍💖
• -s, --get-stats — Balsa prints the numbers of unread and unsent messages and exits. the receipts, literally 📊

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🌐 WEBSITE 🌐

the original page leaves this one blank, so there's no link to hand you here 🙈 just vibes.

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and that's the whole page bestie!! this is Balsa 2.6.5 — the version field up top had no date next to it, so there's no date to give you either 😭 go check your mail, you ate 💅✨👑