general balsa first-time user frustrations

[Dave Della Costa <amarodeeps mindspring com>]

Hey Folks,
Just got Balsa (1.1.6) installed, moved two accounts over to it (one
consisting of imap folders, the other pop3).  Works absolutely
wonderfully to read my mail, but I do have some frustrations:

1) Can't send mail.  Using libesmtp 0.8.2...tried three different
     smtp servers, none work.  Why is this?  This is a major downer.
     And no, it's not because I've got the wrong recipient or any
     thing basically stupid like that.

2) Connected to first frustration; only error messages I get are
     "Message delivery problem, placing it into your outbox..."
     This is useless.  I could use a little more information than
     this.  Noticed some other folks posts they got some info from
     (apparently) logs...why don't I have that/where does that
     information go?  Got nothing in any of my system logs.  Hmm.

3) Why is it that when I change the option for _outgoing_ word wrap,
     it determines how the messages I've _received_ will look?  It's
     not such a big deal, as what I send is gonna be the same as what
     I read...but maybe the better question is, why the #$*& is my
     composition window so damn wide!?  What's with the 30 character or
     so right margin?  I got limited real-estate here folks.  If you
     don't see the connection, try changing your preview font to
     something like helvetica at 14, word wrap at 75 characters, then
     compose a message (oh, my resolution is 1024 by 768).  Ridiculous.

4) The 'unread' and 'total' figures seem to disappear (on the left,
     the folder listings are what I'm talking about) at a certain
     point...haven't nailed down what this behavior is yet specifically,
     but they do disappear.  Whazzat?

Okay, don't mean to sound like a total crank.  I do want to thank the
developers for building an otherwise fine (from my simple user
perspective) free MUA.  It's gonna be awesome once I can just send mail.

Let me know if I need to give some more details.  Thanks for any help.
-Dave D.