Should an email client have a philosophy? For many people, email is
one of our primary means of communication. Something so important
ought to warrant a little thought.

Here's Sup's philosophy.

Using "traditional" email clients today is increasingly problematic.
Anyone who's on a high-traffic mailing list knows this. My ruby-talk
folder is 430 megs and Mutt sits there for 60 seconds while it opens
it. Keeping up with the all the new traffic is painful, even with
Mutt's excellent threading features, simply because there's so much of
it. A single thread can span several pages in the folder index view
alone! And Mutt is probably the fastest email client out there, and
certainly most featureful and in terms of threading and mailing list
support. God help me if I try and throw Thunderbird at that.

The principle problem with traditional clients is that they deal with
individual pieces of email. This places a high mental cost on the user
for each incoming email, by forcing them to ask: Should I keep this
email, or delete it? If I keep it, where should I file it? For
example, I've spent the last 10 years of my life laboriously
hand-filing every email message I received and feeling a mild sense of
panic every time an email was both "from Mom" and "about school". The
massive amounts of email that many people receive, and the cheap cost
of storage, have made these questions both more costly and less useful
to answer.

I think Gmail has taken the right approach. As a long-time Mutt user,
I was pretty much blown away when I first saw people use Gmail,
because I saw them treat email differently from how I ever had. I saw
that making certain operations quantitatively easier (namely, search)
resulted in a qualitative difference in usage. You didn't have to
worry about filing things into folders correctly, because you could
just find things later by searching for them. I also saw how
thread-centrism was advantageous over message-centrism when message
volume was high: if nothing else, there's simply less of them.

Much of the inspiration for Sup was based on Gmail. I think it's to
the Gmail designers' credit that they started with a somewhat ad-hoc
idea (hey, we're really good at search engines, so maybe we can build
an email client on top of one) and managed to build something that was
actually better than everything else out there. At least, that's how I
imagine in happened. Maybe they knew what they were doing from the
start.

But ultimately, Gmail wasn't right for me (fuck top posting and HTML
mail), which is why the idea for Sup was born.

Sup is based on the following principles, which I stole directly from
Gmail:

- An immediately accessible and fast search capability over the entire
  email archive eliminates most of the need for folders, and
  eliminates the necessity of having to ever delete email.

- Labels eliminate what little need for folders search doesn't cover.

- A thread-centric approach to the UI is much more in line with how
  people operate than dealing with individual messages is. In the vast
  majority of cases, a message and its context should be subject to
  the same treatment.

Sup is also based on many ideas from mutt and Emacs and vi, having to
do with the fantastic productivity of a console- and keyboard-based
application, the usefulness of multiple buffers, the necessity of
handling multiple email accounts, etc. But those are just details!

Let me know what you think.