It's not Working!!!

This is a FAQ for when Balsa appears to lock up, or other things that you think should be happening aren't. If you can't figure out how to do something but Balsa lets you do it, that's a bug. Report it.

I want a basic mailbox to use IMAP

See this section.

Balsa's frozen!

Odds are it isn't. Watch out for:

I thought I deleted that message!

There are some problems with libmutt and deleting messages. We believe them to be solved now, but they may be lingering. Known causes of messages seeming to be deleted but not really are:

What's that window that flashed on the screen?

Were you checking your mail? Probably. This is the window that displays progress for retrieving POP3 mail. If you don't have any POP3 accounts, it will still appear -- but it'll disappear almost instantly. You can disable displaying this window in preferences.

The address book doesn't import my addresses.

Balsa attempts to open the file ~/.gnome/GnomeCard.gcrd. If you're not using this file, you may need to create a symlink so that Balsa can open it.

There have been slight changes in GnomeCard's file format between its various versions. Balsa is known to work with at least GnomeCard version 1.0.10 and probably most other releases.