NAME

        Balsa - the GNOME email client.

DESCRIPTION

       You can use Balsa to fetch, read, write and send e-mails.

       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.
       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.
       There is also an option to debug POP connections.

       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).

SYNTAX

       balsa [       --help                               ]
             [       --version                            ]
             [  -c | --check-mail                         ]
             [( -m | --compose=)email-address             ]
             [( -a | --attach=)filename                   ]
             [( -o | --open-mailbox=)mailbox[:mailbox]... ]
             [  -u | --open-unread-mailbox                ]
             [  -d | --debug-pop                          ]
             [  -D | --debug-imap                         ]

OPTIONS

       -? , --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. balsa-list@gnome.org ,
                       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  Balsa 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.

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