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