Sup FAQ ------- Q: What does Sup stand for? A: It stands for "what's up?", which is more or less the question I'm asking when I read my mail. Q: If you love GMail so much, why not just use it? A: I hate using a mouse, and I hate ads, and I hate non-programmability and non-extensibility. Q: Why the console? A: There are many advantages to the console. As any Unix user knows, a few keystrokes can accomplish the work of a hundred mouse clicks. Also, you don't need web browser, and you get instantaneous response and a simple interface. That said, a good Ajax programmer could probably replicate GMail pretty easily using Sup as the backend. 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 all that Sup does. Spam filtering should be done by a dedicated tool like SpamAssassin. 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.