Balsa E-Mail Client 1.0.x
=========================

See ChangeLog for the list of the recent changes and NEWS for highlights.

Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Jay Painter, Stuart Parmenter and others
See 'COPYING' for licence information.
See 'AUTHORS' for a list of contributors


Authors:
-------
	See AUTHORS


Website:
-------
	http://www.balsa.net/


Description:
-----------
 	Balsa is an e-mail reader.  This client is part of the GNOME
desktop environment.  It supports local mailboxes, POP3 and IMAP.


Configuration:
-------------
	Balsa has a lot of options to its configure script; you
should run './configure --help' to get an idea of them. More
complete descriptions are here.

--enable-all
	Will turn on some features that are less than stable,
or unfinsished, such as filtering and spell-checking. This
is really use-at-your-own-risk.

--enable-info
	Enable an information pane displaying the status of
all of your mailboxes in the righthand pane, such as unread
messages, etc. This *can* cause problems, but is basically
stable now, so it is enabled by default.

--enable-threads
	Compile Balsa with threading for more responsiveness.
This works very well and should be enabled if possible.

--disable-system-install
	If specified, Balsa will not put files into the 
prefix of Gnome, but instead into the prefix of other Balsa
files. This allows Balsa to be installed locally if you don't
have the permissions to install into /usr or /usr/local or
wherever Gnome lives. Balsa will be able to find all the files
that it needs, but Gnome may not be able to locate certain
resources such as balsa.desktop, balsa.soundlist, etc.

--disable-flock
	Some OSes (like Solaris) are known to be not full
BSD-compatible.  You may want in such a case to disable flock mailbox
locking and use fcntl/lockf functions instead.

--enable-fcntl
	This enables alternative fcntl file locking scheme. This
function is sometimes troublesome over NFS but is POSIX compatible.

--with-gss[=/usr/kerberos]
	This enables GSSAPI Kerberos based authentication scheme. 
Specify the kerberos directory as the argument.


Libraries:
---------
	The binaries are compiled against gnome-libs-1.2.1, if you use
older libraries, you will need to recompile balsa from the source.  Balsa 
also needs the pspell spell checking libraries.


Website:
-------
	Balsa CVS source comes with the Balsa website in the
directory for balsa/website/. Read balsa/website/README and
balsa/website/INSTALL for more information. If you retrieved
this source as a tarball or RPM or deb, this directory 
probably won't exist. To get it, you need to go to ....


Balsa CVS:
---------
	Balsa is hosted on the Gnome CVS servers. To get
the latest source, get the module 'balsa' from the CVS
root ':pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome'.


Help System:
-----------
	In order to compile the help files, you need to have the
GNOME DocBook documentation system. Very good documentation
can be found at: http://www.gnome.org/gdp/gdp-handbook/gettingstarted.html


Balsa as mailto protocol handler:
---------------------------------
	Balsa can be used as mailto protocol handler. You have to edit
the GNOME URL handlers and add mailto protocol with command 
balsa -m "%s".

Mailbox locking:
---------------
	Balsa uses flock+dotfile for mailbox file locking. It does not
use fcntl (although it can be enabled) since this locking method is
very fragile and often not portable (see for example
http://www.washington.edu/pine/tech-notes/low-level.html#locking).

Make sure that your spool directory has drwxrwxrwt (01777) access
privileges. Presently, dotfile locking requires this unconditionally
In the future, we may relax this requirement and will allow you to
shoot yourself in your leg.


Reporting Bugs:
--------------
	See http://www.balsa.net/bugs.html for instructions.  Do not
report bugs with GtkHTML - it is quite unstable. Patches are welcome.


Known issues:
------------

*	Balsa does not play sound on receiving new mail. This part of
	code has to be rewritten to eliminate overlapping sound when
	more than one new mail is received.

*	When dotlocking is not possible (Wrong access privilieges for
	the mailbox file) balsa will open mailbox for reading only.
	Verify that balsa can create dot file in the mailbox directory.
	Recommended access privileges to /var/spool/mail are rwxrwxrwxt (01777)

*	Some versions of libgnome is known to have bugs that lead to 
	balsa crash on startup. Read for details
	http://mail.gnome.org/archives/balsa-list/2000-October/msg00101.html
	and make sure you have at least /usr/lib/libgnome.so.32.3.11.

*       Experimental gcc 2.96 distributed with RedHat 7.0 generates 
	spurious warning messages. You have to configure balsa with 
	--disable-more-warnings option.

*	Older versions of GtkText are buggy and use sometimes wide
        characters for single byte charsets: some european charsets may
        be displayed improperly. gtk+-1.2.8 seems to work OK. We had 
	also some reports that turned out to be a problem with font server
	configuration.
