Common Tasks with Balsa
This section explains many of the things you might want to do with Balsa.
Creating New Mailboxes
You can create new local and IMAP mailboxes by right-clicking in the mailbox list and selecting New Mailbox. This will start a dialog that will let you name the mailbox and specify its location.
To create a new POP3 mailbox, go to the configuration dialog, select the Mailboxes section, and click Add in the POP3 area. A dialog will be displayed that will let you set up the new mailbox.
 | Under Sawfish, this dialog has been known to become obscured, causing the appearance that Balsa has locked up. Move the configuration dialog and see if the new dialog was hidden. |
| The mailbox may not appear in the list immediately, or in the current session of Balsa at all, but it exists. Yes, this is a bug. The best workaround is to make the mailboxes outside of Balsa, using touch or maildirmake |
Moving Messages
There are several methods available for moving or copying messages from one mailbox to another. The first is via the Transfer context menu, and the second is using drag and drop.
To transfer messages using the Transfer menu, simply select the messages you desire to move from one mailbox, then bring up the context menu and select the Transfer submenu. This will display a list of mailboxes similar to the mailbox list in the main window. The list can be scrolled and trees expanded and collapsed, although these changes will not be reflected in the main list. Selecting a mailbox will start the transfer.
The other method of transferring messages is to simply drag and drop the message(s) from the message index to the desired destination. Select the message(s) you wish to transfer, then drag them using the mouse until they are over the intended mailbox. The destination can either be in the mailbox list in the main window, or if open mailbox tabs are enabled the messages can be dragged to them. Messages are copied by default, but holding down the Shift key when dropping the messages will move them instead.
I want one of the main folders to be IMAP
First, create the IMAP folder as you want it configured. Then, press right mouse button on the mailbox entry and select "Mark as Inbox". That is all!
I want Balsa to guess my friends
Balsa can expand the names of your contacts it finds in Balsa addressbooks. It will do this by both the Card Name (unique alias) and the Full Name.
As you type a username in any of the To:, Cc:, or Bcc: entry boxes in the Compose window, it will do a case insensitive search in the addressbook for a matching username, and fill in the best match. This is best demonstrated with the following picture:
The example shows what it looks like if "Balsa Mailing List" is in your address book, and you have typed "ba"
If the match shown is what you want, simply press Enter to move to the next entry, or press Comma or End to type another e-mail address.
If the match shown is not the one you want, pressing Tab will cycle through all possible matches. If there is only one match, it will move to the end of the match. At any point, you can simply continue typing and ignore the matched entry. To move to the next entry without accepting the shown entry, press the Down arrow.
To enable this feature, you must select which address books you wish to be searched for aliases to expand. This can be done in the Preferences window, under the Address Books tab. Also, some address books are expensive to lookup. You will need then to press Ctrl-R to explicitly expand the alias.
Setting up LDAP address books
Only steps crucial for balsa are described here. Some of the steps may be specific to OpenLDAP server. Whenever in doubt, consult the documentation provided with your LDAP server.
Install the LDAP server software.
Configure. In the case of OpenLDAP, edit /etc/openldap/ldap.conf and /etc/openldap/slapd.conf. Consult your LDAP configuration and other sources to choose the right Domain Name for your institution and authentication level apriopriate to your environment.
Import data to your LDAP server. OpenLDAP comes with a set of migration tools but they do not create directly objects of standard inetOrgPerson class which is an apropriate type for address book entry. You may need to tune them.
Balsa searches for objects having mail attribute. The search is done on the cn attribute and the search filter has a form "(&(mail=*)(cn=John D))". Balsa uses cn (common name), givenName (given name), sn (surname) and mail (e-mail address) attributes of the found objects.