5 A: A console-based email client for people with a lot of email.
7 Q: What does Sup stand for?
10 Q: Sup looks like a text-based Gmail.
11 A: First I stole their ideas. Then I improved them.
13 Q: Why not just use Gmail?
14 A: I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate non-programmability and
17 Also, Gmail doesn't let you use a monospace font, which is just
20 Also, Gmail encourages top-posting. THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED!
23 A: Because a keystroke is worth a hundred mouse clicks, as any Unix
24 user knows. Because you don't need web browser. Because you get
25 instantaneous response and a simple interface.
27 Q: How does Sup deal with spam?
28 A: You can manually mark messages as spam, which prevents them from
29 showing up in future searches. Later, you can run a batch process to
30 remove such messages from your sources. That's as far as Sup goes.
31 Spam filtering should be done by a dedicated tool like SpamAssassin.
33 Q: How do I delete a message?
34 A: Why delete? Unless it's spam, you might as well just archive it.
37 A: Ok, press the 'd' key.
39 Q: But I want to delete it for real, not just add a 'deleted' flag in
40 the index. I want it gone from disk!
41 A: Currently, for mbox sources, there is a batch deletion tool that
42 will strip out all messages marked as spam or deleted.
44 Q: How well does Sup play with other mail clients?
45 A: Not well at all. If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered
46 due to some other client, Sup will have to rebuild its index for
47 that message source. For example, for mbox files, reading a single
48 unread message changes the offsets of every file on disk. Rather
49 than rescanning every time, Sup assumes sources don't change except
50 by having new messages added. If that assumption is violated,
51 you'll have to sync the index.
53 Q: How do I back up my index?
54 A: Since the contents of the messages are recoverable from their
55 sources using sup-sync, all you need to back up is the message
56 state. To do this, simply run:
58 This will save all message state in a big text file, which you
59 should probably compress.
61 Q: How do I restore the message state I saved in my state dump?
63 sup-sync [<source>+] --restored --restore <dumpfile>
64 where <dumpfile> was created as above.
66 Q: Ferret crashed and I can't read my index. Luckily I made a state
67 dump. What should I do?
68 Q: How do I rebuild the index completely?
70 rm -rf ~/.sup/ferret # omg wtf
71 sup-sync --all-sources --all --restore <dumpfile>
72 Voila! A brand new index.
74 Q: I want to move messages from one source to another. (E.g., my
75 primary inbox is an IMAP server with a quota, and I want to move
76 some of those messages to local mbox files.) How do I do that while
77 preserving message state?
78 A: Move the messages from the source to the target using whatever tool
79 you'd like. Mutt's a good one. :) Then run:
80 sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>
82 Note that if you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on
83 the order in which you do it, the messages may be treated as
84 missing and then deleted from the index, which means that their
85 states will be lost when you sync the other source. So do them both
88 Q: What are all these "Redwood" references I see in the code?
89 A: That was Sup's original name. (Think pine, elm. Although I was a
90 Mutt user, I couldn't think of a good progression there.) But it was
91 taken by another project on RubyForge, and wasn't that original, and
92 was too long to type anyways.
97 P: I get some error message from Rubymail about frozen strings when
98 importing messages with attachments.
99 S: The current solution is to directly modify RubyMail. Change line 159 of
101 chunk = chunk[0..start]
102 This is because RubyMail hasn't been updated since like Ruby 1.8.2.
103 Please bug Matt Armstrong.
106 /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `transfer': allocator undefined for Bignum (TypeError)
107 S: You need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.5. YAML in earlier versions can't
108 parse BigNums, but Sup relies on that for Maildir and IMAP.
111 /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/imap.rb:204: uninitialized constant Net::IMAP::SSL (NameError)
112 S: You need to install a package called libssl-ruby or something similar.
113 Or, don't use imaps:// sources. Ruby's IMAP library otherwise fails in
114 this completely uninformative manner.
116 P: When I run Sup remotely and view an HTML attachment, an existing
117 Firefox on the *local* machine is redirected to the attachment
118 file, which it can't find (since it's on the remote machine). How do
119 I view HTML attachments in this environment?
120 S: Put this in your ~/.mailcap on the machine you run Sup on:
121 text/html; /usr/bin/firefox -a sup '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html