Balsa 0.4.9 comments

[Wayne Schuller <w schuller gpph unimelb edu au>]

hi everyone,

I've just started using Bala 0.4.9 and I have some initial comments, bug reports.

I'm on Redhat 5.2 (Intel) with Gnome 0.99.4 (I'll get 0.99.5 tomorrow).

My overall impressions are very postive. Balsa looks very nice. I come from a Eudora background, so I'm
glad that it's quite similar.

This is probably a well known bug, but it core dumps for me when checking mail as a POP client.

I've simply setup fetchmail to get the mail, and using Balsa to read it. It works quite well...
I'm actually surprised that you would want to get POP/IMAP support into the first version of Balsa when you can just use fetchmail. But I agree that in built pop/imap support is necessary eventually.

Here are some comments based on order of priority:

- There is no status bar for checking mail. This isn't as important when using fetchmail, but for POP/Imap some sort of status bar will be needed for when downloading mail. I suggest looking at how Eudora 4.0 does it. Eudora 3.0 and below used to have a popup window with a status bar showing the mail downloading. Eudora 4.0 now does it in the 'background' with the status bar at the bottom of the screen. This allows you to keep browsing mail when mail is being downloaded (otherwise you have to wait for the annoying pop up status bar to dissapear before you can read mail).

-Does Balsa assume some sort of Biff program is running? I'm using the gnome panel clock and mail notify applet, and it works good at telling me i had new mail. Without this I would never know. This is a good setup, but maybe the balsa docs should recommend using this applet somewhere...

-Why aren't mailbox transfers and mail deletions immediate in their effect? SHould they be? I have to click on "Mailboxes -> Commit Current" to make these have an effect. Would be better for this to be instant. I'm sure we'll have an "undo" button eventually.

-Are mailboxes simply based on text files with the email concatenated inside them? This is a great idea. Very open. Plus it is compatible with other email programs like elm. Maybe down the track it would be a good idea to allow Balsa to read gziped mailboxes, for those of us who have more spare CPU than we do HD space.

-Use of GTK+/Gnome widgets is mostly excellent. I really like being able to pull off the mailboxs window. Would it be possible to allow us to resize the width of the mailbox window? Some of use who have alot of nested mailboxes (and big screens) can afford to make it wider. The names of some of my mailboxes is cutoff after a certain number of characters, but that may be a gtk bug (I recently installed 1.1.14 too)...

-I sometimes have lines cut off at the bottom of my emails. It may only be the bottom line, but in some of my emails balsa is clearly cutting off something toward the end.

All in all I think balsa is panning out to be a great mail reader. If all the current bugs can be ironed out, and the POP/Imap stuff working, it will be very good.. I suggest definitely not adding any more features until all this happens. If I can get time I'll try and figure out how balsa works so maybe i'll even start submitting patches... are there many active developers working on gnome? Also, does http://cvs.gnome.org/lxr/source/balsa/ChangeLog show changes for all balsa files or just those in the top level directory? (I'm pretty sure it's the former).

Good luck,
wayne
ps: please excuse any typos.. I'm writing this in balsa 0.4.9 :)