Expand your email options with alternative Linux clients

Email clients are often loaded down with too many features. Rather than one big groupware package such as Outlook or Evolution, sometimes a simple email client is all you need.

We look at three Linux email-only clients and see how they fare against today's standards. The email clients we'll look at are Balsa, KMail, and Sylpheed.

Balsa

Ten years ago when it was still in beta, this application was solid, reliable, and user-friendly. It didn't have extensions, spell check, or junk mail. Balsa simply read, replied to, deleted and saved your email.

Balsa was the first GUI tool that I used in Linux whose sole purpose was to process email. It wasn't part of the quickly outmoded Mozilla; it integrated with my desktop in both look and feel, which was important. I'll always remember how different Mozilla looked when it fired up; at the time, I was trying desperately to make my Linux desktop not look like the old-school Unix-like desktop, and Balsa gave me that ability.

Today, Balsa is an email client for the GNOME desktop. At one time, the developers at GNOME were going to create an office suite, and Balsa was going to be the email application for that suite. Balsa is still standalone, however, and offers the following features:

• Local mailbox format support (mbox, maildir, and mh)
• Allows nested mailboxes
• POP3 and IMAP support
• Printing support
• Spell check
• Multi-threaded email retrieval
• MIME support
• SMTP or local MTA support
• GNOME-integrated address book
• Multiple character sets for composing and reading messages
• File attachments
• GPG/OpenPGP signing and encryption

Installing Balsa is simple. If you are using an rpm-based distribution, you can run yum install balsa. If you are running an apt-based distribution, you can run apt-get install balsa. The installation will fetch the requirements — at minimum, it will install libESMTP and GMime — and do its thing.

The first time you run Balsa, you'll need to set up your account. The first screen is a simple Welcome screen. The next screen is where the real action occurs. Figure A illustrates the information needed to setup your email account with Balsa.

Figure A At this point the only incoming mail server types are POP3 and IMAP

The next screen, Figure B, allows you to fine-tune your Mail Files directories.

Figure B The default Balsa directories should work fine in a standalone installation

The final screen asks if you want to use Balsa as your default email client. By selecting Yes, you'll configure Balsa to be used when you click mailto: links within a website or document.

Once Balsa is configured, you'll see the default Balsa window, which reveals the simplistic beauty of this email client. This window is shown in Figure C.

Figure C Balsa is a bare-bones basic e-mail client, but it does its job well

During the initial setup, there was a place to name the incoming mail server; this isn't a name for the server, but the actual address. No fear, though: you can go into the Settings menu and select Preferences to take care of this. Select Mail Options to show the remote mailbox settings. Figure D shows the three strange accounts that Balsa creates.

Figure D Delete two of these accounts and modify the third for your incoming mail server settings

Balsa's address book

Balsa behaves much like your standard email client. One of the few differences is getting an address book up and running. To get started, select the Preferences entry from the Settings menu and then select Address Books.

Let's add an LDIF-type address book. From wherever the source, you'll have to export your address book as a LDIF list. Once you have that, back in Balsa, press the Add button and select LDIF from the list. A new window will appear, which is where you'll search for your exported address book. Find that address book, name it, and press Add. Your addresses are now available in Balsa.

Balsa handles junk mail filtering through procmail, an outstanding tool for the filtering of email. Procmail is far too complicated to tag onto this section of this article, however. Outside of handling junk mail, Balsa is a standard email client. The learning curve is nil.

KMail

KMail is part of the Kontact suite of tools, but can be run as a standalone client. KMail is installed with a standard KDE installation but, like many KDE applications, does not depend on KDE to be up and running. KMail is a bit more complex (read: feature-rich) than Balsa. KMail includes the following features:

• Maildir support
• Address book
• Older message expiration
• Auto-encryption using OpenPGP
• POP3, IMAP support
• SSL/TLS support
• Pipelining for POP3
• On-demand downloading
• SMTP authentication
• SMTP over SSL/TLS
• DIGEST-MD5 authentication
• Nested folders
• Mail filters and local delivery
• Mailing list aware
• External mail client importing
• Search
• HTML mail support
• Spelling check
• Threaded viewing
• Multiple identities
• Colour quoting
• Background sending/receiving
• KDE integration
• Popup address completion
• Mail bounce (anti-spam)
• UTF-7 support
• PGP/MIME support
• S/MIME support
• Custom icons and dates

As you can see, the feature list for KMail is much longer than for Balsa.

Setting up an email account is almost self-explanatory with KMail. Simply go to the Settings menu and select Configure KMail. From the new window shown in Figure F, press the Accounts button and then press Add.

Figure E The KMail account setup is without tricks or traps

One of the most interesting features of KMail is the Certificate Manager Kleopatra, a KDE tool used for managing X.509 certificates in the GpgSM keybox and for retrieving certificates from LDAP servers. This tool is more of a power-user tool because it allows you to manage encryption keys used in OpenPGP signatures. You can even generate new key pairs from within Kleopatra.

Another handy feature in KMail is the ability to set expiration dates for folders or mail. Suppose you have a particular folder that you want emptied every 30 days; to do this, right-click on that folder and select Expire. A new window will open — shown in Figure G — where you'll configure this action.

Figure F You can configure KMail to expire either read or unread e-mail at different times.

Once you have decided which types of email will expire, you can set up their configuration.

KMail also includes both an anti-junk and anti-spam filter wizard. The anti-spam wizard configures SpamAssassin, and the anti-virus wizard configures ClamAV. Both tools are quickly becoming standard in Linux; both wizards make setup easy. To get these tools, simply go to the Tools menu and select which wizard you want to start.

Outside of these tools, KMail is exactly what you would expect from a modern e-mail client.

Sylpheed

Sylpheed is another standalone email client that contains all the features you'd expect in an email client:

• Includes an outstanding UI
• Handles Junk filtering
• Supports multiple protocols
• Internationalisation
• Filters and searches

Installing Sylpheed with an rpm-based distribution is as simple as issuing the command yum install sylpheed. Once installed, issue the command sylpheed. You'll have to configure your first account before using the client. Configuring an account is fairly straightforward: Figure H illustrates the necessary items.

Figure G As you can see, there are a number of more advanced tabs you can configure for this client

Once set up, Sylpheed behaves exactly as you would expect. One of the most useful tools available is the filtering tool. This tool can be invoked two ways. If you're reading an email, you can select Create Filter Rule from the Tools menu and choose from the following:

• Automatically
• By: From
• By: To
• By: Subject

You can also create rules by starting up the Filter Settings from the Configuration menu. In the window shown in Figure I, you can add, edit or delete rules.

Figure H You can move rules up or down a list to change their priority

There is one other feature unique to Sylpheed that bears a bit of attention. The Actions tool — invoked from the Configuration menu — allows you to configure external commands to process message files. Suppose you want to view a selected message in an external viewer (i.e., gedit.) To do this, fire up the tool and enter the following:

• Menu Name: Gedit
• Command Line: gedit %p&

Press the Add button and your new action will appear in the Registered Actions window. You can see this in Figure J.

Figure I To execute your action, go to the Actions menu (from the Tools menu) and select the Gedit entry.

This tool can become very powerful if used correctly. Like KMail and Balsa, Sylpheed is an email client that meets today's demands, but adds a bit of extra oomph in a way only a Linux tool can.

Final thoughts

We've run the gamut of email clients over the years, and can therefore safely say that all three of the above clients will satisfy most of your needs. The biggest downfall for two of these clients — Balsa and Sylpheed — would be their inability to successfully view HTML mail, but each make up for this by either having developed plug-ins for external viewing of HTML mail, as in the case of Sylpheed, or having enough outstanding features to render this a non-issue.

Of course, for some, the ability to view HTML mail is crucial; for those people, KMail is the client to use, since it is able to render HTML mail. Outside HTML mail, each of these clients does an outstanding job. Any Linux user would be remiss to not give at least one of these clients a chance.