Sup FAQ ------- Q: What does Sup stand for? A: It stands for "what's up?", which is more or less the question in mind when I fire up my mail client. Q: If you love Gmail so much, why not just use it? A: I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate non-programmability and non-extensibility. Also, Gmail encourages top-posting. THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED! Also, Gmail doesn't let you use a monospace font, which is just plain lame. 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: Ok, at some point I plan to have a batch deletion tool that will run through a source and delete all messages that have a 'spam' or 'deleted' tags. But that doesn't exist yet. Q: I got some error message about needing to run sup-sync --changed when I tried to read a message. What's that about? A: If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered in a source, Sup may have to rebuild its index for that 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. The alternative is to rescan every source when Sup starts up. Because Sup is designed to work with arbitrarily large mbox files, this would not be a good idea. Q: How do I back up my index? Q: How do I make a state dump? 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: I upgraded Ferret and the index format changed. I need to completely rebuild my index. How do I do this? A: First, you'll need a complete state dump. If you haven't made one, you'll need to downgrade Ferret and make a state dump as above. Then run these commands: 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. Then (and this is the important part), run: sup-sync --changed If you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on the order, 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. Q: What are all these "Redwood" references I see in the code? A: That was Sup's original name. (Think pine, elm. Although I am 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. Q: How is Sup possible? A: Sup is only possible through the hard work of Dave Balmain, the author of ferret, which is the search engine behind Sup. Ferret is really a first-class piece of software, and it's due to the tremendous amount of time and effort he's put in to it. 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 Lickey. 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 somewhat uninformative manner.