How To Install balsa on Ubuntu

Posted on April 1, 2023  (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )

3 minutes  • 453 words

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install balsa on Ubuntu.

What is balsa

balsa is:

Balsa is a highly configurable and robust mail client for the GNOME desktop. It supports both POP3 and IMAP servers as well as the mbox, maildir and mh local mailbox formats. Balsa also supports SMTP and/or the use of a local MTA such as Sendmail.

Some of Balsa’s other features include:

• Allowing nested mailboxes
• Printing
• Spell Checking
• Multi-threaded mail retrieval
• MIME support (view images inline, save parts)
• GPE Palmtop, LDAP, LDIF and vCard address book support
• Multiple character sets for composing and reading messages
• File attachments on outgoing messages
• GPG/OpenPGP mail signing and encryption

Support for Kerberos and SSL has been enabled in this package.

There are three methods to install balsa on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install balsa Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install balsa using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install balsa

Install balsa Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install balsa using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install balsa

Install balsa Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install balsa using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install balsa

How To Uninstall balsa on Ubuntu

To uninstall only the balsa package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove balsa

Uninstall balsa And Its Dependencies

To uninstall balsa and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove balsa

Remove balsa Configurations and Data

To remove balsa configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge balsa

Remove balsa configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove balsa configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge balsa

Dependencies

balsa have the following dependencies:

• balsa-data
• pinentry-gnome3
• libc6
• libcairo2
• libcanberra-gtk3-0
• libcanberra0
• libcompfaceg1
• libfribidi0
• libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0
• libglib2.0-0
• libgmime-3.0-0
• libgnutls30
• libgpgme11
• libgspell-1-2
• libgssapi-krb5-2
• libgtk-3-0
• libgtksourceview-4-0
• libical3
• libldap-2.5-0
• libpango-1.0-0
• libpangocairo-1.0-0
• libsecret-1-0
• libsqlite3-0
• libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37
• libxml2

References

• balsa website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install balsa package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.