Re: I'm new to balsa and can't get it to work ...

["E . A . Zen" <ericzen ez-net com>]

On 2002.03.24 19:28 Craig McCluskey wrote:
Howdy!

I'm a long time unix user/admin and am currently using RH7.2 at
home.
I received email at UT's mail machine, which I access via POP.
My current mail program here at home is Netscape, which I'd like
to
change.
I have a Mac at the university and use Eudora on it.

My wife is using Win3.11 and Eudora. I'm trying to get her on
Linux
and need to get an email client she can use. Enter balsa,
alledged to
be patterned after Eudora.

I've finally gotten balsa to where it can send email (the :25
after the
Remote SMTP Server is vitally necessary), but I can't get it to
check
my mail box. I have debug enabled and get a Balsa Information
window
that says, "POP3 mailbox UT accessing error: Authentication
failed."

I looked at the archived posts from this mail list but found
nothing
that seemed to help.

In the Balsa Preferences (which do not look like what the Help
file says
they should -- they're missing Identity, Signature, and Print) I
have
set up a Remote Mailbox of type POP3 and have checked "Enable
check for
new mail". Checking or unchecking "Use APOP Authentication"
makes no
difference.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

On a different subject, I inferred from reading the archives
that POP
mail boxes are handled as one large text file. How does this
compare
with Eudora's handling (Eudora appears to download individual
messages,
appending them to its Inbox file)?

On yet a different subject, there were some comments in the
archives
about
lost (disappearing) email. Is this a problem? I have a LOT of
email
saved up on my machine (du -sh ~/nsmail gives 74 MB). Might
there be a
problem with losing some of it with balsa?

Thanks,

Craig
--

 /"\                       
 \ /  ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN	  "Friends don't send friends
  X   AGAINST HTML MAIL    		  HTML email."
 / \  AND POSTINGS
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reply of 020325:1147CT
subject of "Balsa Issues"
reason for living "It's something to do."
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RH7.2 is what I'm on for another month myself.  If you haven't
yet, run uptodate; you'll find this will get most documentation
matching the current client.

You may know this, but I'd like to step you through the account
setup.

Click the "Preferences" under the "Settings" menu.
The first tab is "Mail Servers"

Now, here's where a difference comes in.  If you have the new
one, when you click "Add," you will get a pop over menu that
first asks what kind of box the new account is meant to be.  If
you're still on the older version that comes with RH7.2, you'll
go straight into slightly less friendly form window.

Since I'm on the old one (which will be sufficiently similar to
the new one), I'll explain the window there.

First is the Mailbox's name.  This can be any name you use to
distinguish one mail service from another.  On mine, my ISP's is
Vaughn (named after the mail server's network name) and for
roogroup.com's email, I named it Sat's 50/50 (because he's a
windows users and tends to have problems with adminstering his
email server).  You could call it Mr. Toad's Wild Ride for all
this part makes a difference.
Second, you have the server, which is vitally important, no
matter your default.  Servers are typically mail.<domain>.<tld>
with ports almost always set to 110 (that's the next box, so,
no, you don't need to do a :110).
Third, username and password!  No matter your default, you need
to enter this information for the server!!!  This appears to be
where the error is occurring for you.
Finally, it's considered polite to delete your mail from the
admin's server;)

As for your question about the superblock text file for message
handling, this is referred to as MH format, and is generally
preferrable to the individual files, simply for reasons of
clutter reduction and linear access; if you used ext3 when
creating your partition(s), you'll find the equivelant of
defragging a way to speed things up after you start accumulating
500Kbx-2Mbs of data to the file.  You'll find MH format, the
oldest and orignal format of POSIX systems, the most common
format used.  If you want an option to save as seperate files,
I'm sure that would be nice feature request.

On a related issue to the superblock text file, you're worried
about the deletion of files, which is understandable.  When you
open up a word processor, say AbiWord for example, and you start
or continue writing to a document, the actual document itself
will not have anything saved to it until you either click save,
or exit (and the system usually asks if you want to save). 
Balsa is not much different in that respect.  It hold pieces of
the superblock text file in the memory and tags on the new files
to the end of that memory until you exit.  More to it, that is
the way it started.  Now, Balsa usually writes to the file after
the messages have been downloaded, of course, if Balsa crashes
or is killed, naturally loss will occur (you should be happy,
the version with RH7.2 is far more stable than predecessors). 
More and better saving techniques are introduced with each
stable release version, so, I seriously would recommend
upgrading to atleast 1.2.3 (Coincidence?  Nah;-).

I hope I've answered your questions and perhaps spotted your
authentication trouble for you.