Sup FAQ
-------
+Q: What is Sup?
+A: A console-based email client for people with a lot of email.
+
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.
+A: "What's up?"
+
+Q: Sup looks like a text-based Gmail.
+A: First I stole their ideas. Then I improved them.
-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.
+Q: Why not just use Gmail?
+A: 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
+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.
+ showing up in future searches. Later, you can run a batch process to
+ remove such messages from your sources. 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: 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.
+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?
-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-sync [<source>+] --restored --restore <dumpfile>
where <dumpfile> was created as above.
-Q: I see this message from Ferret:
- Error occured in index.c:825 - sis_find_segments_file
-A: Yikes! You've upgraded Ferret and the index format changed beneath
- you. Follow the index rebuild instructions below.
-
-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:
+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 <dumpfile>
Voila! A brand new index.
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:
+ you'd like. Mutt's a good one. :) Then run:
sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>
- 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.
+ 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 am a
+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.
-
-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.
+ taken by another project on RubyForge, and wasn't that original, and
+ was too long to type anyways.
+
+Common Problems
+---------------
+
+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
projects / sup / blobdiff