4 Q: What does Sup stand for?
5 A: It stands for "what's up?", which is more or less the question in
6 mind when I fire up my mail client.
8 Q: If you love Gmail so much, why not just use it?
9 A: I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate non-programmability
10 and non-extensibility.
12 Also, Gmail encourages top-posting. THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED!
14 Also, Gmail doesn't let you use a monospace font, which is just
18 A: Because a keystroke is worth a hundred mouse clicks (as any Unix
19 user knows). Because you don't need web browser. Because you get
20 instantaneous response and a simple interface.
22 Q: How does Sup deal with spam?
23 A: You can manually mark messages as spam, which prevents them from
24 showing up in future searches, but that's as far as Sup goes. Spam
25 filtering should be done by a dedicated tool like SpamAssassin.
27 Q: How do I delete a message?
28 A: Why delete? Unless it's spam, you might as well just archive it.
31 A: Ok, press the 'd' key.
33 Q: But I want to delete it for real, not just add a 'deleted' flag in
34 the index. I want it gone from disk!
35 A: Ok, at some point I plan to have a batch deletion tool that will
36 run through a source and delete all messages that have a 'spam' or
37 'deleted' tags. But that doesn't exist yet.
39 Q: I got some error message about needing to run sup-sync --changed
40 when I tried to read a message. What's that about?
41 A: If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered in a source, Sup
42 may have to rebuild its index for that source. For example, for
43 mbox files, reading a single unread message changes the offsets of
44 every file on disk. Rather than rescanning every time, Sup assumes
45 sources don't change except by having new messages added. If that
46 assumption is violated, you'll have to sync the index.
48 The alternative is to rescan every source when Sup starts up.
49 Because Sup is designed to work with arbitrarily large mbox files,
50 this would not be a good idea.
52 Q: How do I back up my index?
53 Q: How do I make a state dump?
54 A: Since the contents of the messages are recoverable from their
55 sources using sup-sync, all you need to back up is the message
56 state. To do this, simply run:
58 This will save all message state in a big text file, which you
59 should probably compress.
61 Q: How do I restore the message state I saved in my state dump?
63 sup-sync [<source>+] --restored --restore <dumpfile>
64 where <dumpfile> was created as above.
66 Q: I upgraded Ferret and the index format changed. I need to
67 completely rebuild my index. How do I do this?
68 A: First, you'll need a complete state dump. If you haven't made
69 one, you'll need to downgrade Ferret and make a state dump as
70 above. Then run these commands:
71 rm -rf ~/.sup/ferret # omg wtf
72 sup-sync --all-sources --all --restore <dumpfile>
73 Voila! A brand new index.
75 Q: I want to move messages from one source to another. (E.g., my
76 primary inbox is an IMAP server with a quota, and I want to move
77 some of those messages to local mbox files.) How do I do that while
78 preserving message state?
79 A: Move the messages from the source to the target using whatever tool
80 you'd like. Then (and this is the important part), run:
81 sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>
83 If you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on the order,
84 the messages may be treated as missing and then deleted from the
85 index, which means that their states will be lost when you sync the
88 Q: What are all these "Redwood" references I see in the code?
89 A: That was Sup's original name. (Think pine, elm. Although I am a
90 Mutt user, I couldn't think of a good progression there.) But it was
91 taken by another project on RubyForge, and wasn't that original,
92 and was too long to type anyways.
94 Maybe one day I'll do a huge search-and-replace on the code, but it
95 doesn't seem that important at this point.
97 Q: How is Sup possible?
98 A: Sup is only possible through the hard work of Dave Balmain, the
99 author of ferret, which is the search engine behind Sup. Ferret is
100 really a first-class piece of software, and it's due to the
101 tremendous amount of time and effort he's put in to it.
106 P: I see this message from Ferret:
107 Error occured in index.c:825 - sis_find_segments_file
108 S: Yikes! You've upgraded Ferret and the index format changed beneath
109 you. Follow the index rebuild instructions above.
111 P: I get some error message from Rubymail about frozen strings when
112 importing messages with attachments.
113 S: The current solution is to directly modify RubyMail. Change line 159 of
115 chunk = chunk[0..start]
116 This is because RubyMail hasn't been updated since like Ruby 1.8.2.
117 Please bug Matt Lickey.
120 /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `transfer': allocator undefined for Bignum (TypeError)
121 S: You need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.5. YAML in earlier versions can't
122 parse BigNums, but Sup relies on that for Maildir and IMAP.
125 /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/imap.rb:204: uninitialized constant Net::IMAP::SSL (NameError)
126 S: You need to install a package called libssl-ruby or something similar.
127 Or, don't use imaps:// sources. Ruby's IMAP library otherwise fails in
128 this somewhat uninformative manner.
130 P: When I run Sup remotely and view an HTML attachment, an existing
131 Firefox on the *local* machine is redirected to the attachment
132 file, which it can't find (since it's on the remote machine). How do
133 I view HTML attachments in this environment?
134 S: Put this in your ~/.mailcap on the machine you run Sup on:
135 text/html; /usr/bin/firefox -a sup '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html