5 A: Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email.
6 It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact-
7 list management, custom code insertion via a hook system, and more.
8 If you're the type of person who treats email as an extension of your
9 long-term memory, Sup is for you.
11 Q: What does Sup stand for?
14 Q: Sup looks like a text-based Gmail.
15 A: I stole their ideas. And improved them!
17 Q: Why not just use Gmail?
18 A: I wrote Sup because I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate
19 non-programmability and non-extensibility.
21 Also, Gmail doesn't let you use a monospace font, which is just
24 Also, Gmail encourages top-posting. THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED!
27 A: Because a keystroke is worth a hundred mouse clicks, as any Unix
28 user knows. Because you don't need web browser. Because you get
29 instantaneous response and a simple interface.
31 Q: How does Sup deal with spam?
32 A: You can manually mark messages as spam, which prevents them from
33 showing up in future searches, but that's as far as Sup goes. Spam
34 filtering should be done by a dedicated tool like SpamAssassin.
36 Q: How do I delete a message?
37 A: Why delete? Unless it's spam, you might as well just archive it.
40 A: Ok, press the 'd' key.
42 Q: But I want to delete it for real, not just add a 'deleted' flag in
43 the index. I want it gone from disk!
44 A: Currently, for mbox sources, there is a batch deletion tool that
45 will strip out all messages marked as spam or deleted.
47 Q: How well does Sup play with other mail clients?
48 A: Not well at all. If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered
49 due to some other client, Sup will have to rebuild its index for
50 that message source. For example, for mbox files, reading a single
51 unread message changes the offsets of every file on disk. Rather
52 than rescanning every time, Sup assumes sources don't change except
53 by having new messages added. If that assumption is violated,
54 you'll have to sync the index.
56 Q: How do I back up my index?
57 A: Since the contents of the messages are recoverable from their
58 sources using sup-sync, all you need to back up is the message
59 state. To do this, simply run:
61 This will save all message state in a big text file, which you
62 should probably compress.
64 Q: How do I restore the message state I saved in my state dump?
66 sup-sync [<source>+] --restored --restore <dumpfile>
67 where <dumpfile> was created as above.
69 Q: Ferret crashed and I can't read my index. Luckily I made a state
70 dump. What should I do?
71 Q: How do I rebuild the index completely?
73 rm -rf ~/.sup/ferret # omg wtf
74 sup-sync --all-sources --all --restore <dumpfile>
75 Voila! A brand new index.
77 Q: I want to move messages from one source to another. (E.g., my
78 primary inbox is an IMAP server with a quota, and I want to move
79 some of those messages to local mbox files.) How do I do that while
80 preserving message state?
81 A: Move the messages from the source to the target using whatever tool
82 you'd like. Mutt's a good one. :) Then run:
83 sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>
85 Note that if you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on
86 the order in which you do it, the messages may be treated as
87 missing and then deleted from the index, which means that their
88 states will be lost when you sync the other source. So do them both
91 Q: What are all these "Redwood" references I see in the code?
92 A: That was Sup's original name. (Think pine, elm. Although I was a
93 Mutt user, I couldn't think of a good progression there.) But it
94 was taken by another project on RubyForge, and wasn't that
95 original, and was too long to type anyways.
97 Maybe one day I'll do a huge search-and-replace on the code, but it
98 doesn't seem that important at this point.
103 P: I see this message from Ferret:
104 Error occured in index.c:825 - sis_find_segments_file
105 S: Yikes! You've upgraded Ferret and the index format changed beneath
106 you. Follow the index rebuild instructions above.
108 P: I get some error message from Rubymail about frozen strings when
109 importing messages with attachments.
110 S: The current solution is to directly modify RubyMail. Change line 159 of
112 chunk = chunk[0..start]
113 This is because RubyMail hasn't been updated since like Ruby 1.8.2.
114 Please bug Matt Armstrong.
117 /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `transfer': allocator undefined for Bignum (TypeError)
118 S: You need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.5. YAML in earlier versions can't
119 parse BigNums, but Sup relies on that for Maildir and IMAP.
122 /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/imap.rb:204: uninitialized constant Net::IMAP::SSL (NameError)
123 S: You need to install a package called libssl-ruby or something similar.
124 Or, don't use imaps:// sources. Ruby's IMAP library otherwise fails in
125 this completely uninformative manner.
127 P: When I run Sup remotely and view an HTML attachment, an existing
128 Firefox on the *local* machine is redirected to the attachment
129 file, which it can't find (since it's on the remote machine). How do
130 I view HTML attachments in this environment?
131 S: Put this in your ~/.mailcap on the machine you run Sup on:
132 text/html; /usr/bin/firefox -a sup '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html