On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 09:22 -0500, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
> I think balsa is a nice, simple MUA and I generally recommend it for
users
> that I install Linux for. I'm not a fan of the current
Outlook/Evolution
> approach. Having said that, balsa is a great candidate for Fedora
Extras.
> If people want to reduce the size of Fedora Core (this opinion
seems to
> be pretty much unanimous) then we need to start making compromises
like
> this.
The problem with most MUAs, is that they don't support advanced features, like SASL authentication (CRAM-MD5, Kerberos, X.509, etc) or disconnected (offline) operation when using IMAP. That's one of the reasons I keep using Evolution, since I *need* Kerberos authentication support to access my IMAP mailbox. AFAIK, only Pine does also support Kerberos authentication via SASL.
balsa-2.2.x does support Kerberos authentication (AUTH=GSSAPI). It supports AUTH=CRAM-MD5 as well. It is a lightweight client and the offline operation is not there but it can well open mailboxes containing 10000+ messages over a dialup link (the slow part is GtkTreeView, it has problems rendering that many rows). Try that with other heavy weight MUAs without having a cache preloaded.
Pawel
