Welcome to Sup! Here's how to actually use it.

First, try running 'sup'. Assuming this is your first time, you'll be
confronted with a mostly blank screen, and a notice at the bottom that
you have no new messages. That's because Sup doesn't have any messages
in its index yet.

If you want to play around a little at this point, you can press 'b'
to cycle between buffers and 'x' to kill a buffer. There's probably
not too much interesting there, but there's a log buffer with some
cryptic messages. You can also press '?' at any point to get a list of
keyboard commands, but in the absense of any email, these will be
mostly useless. When you're bored, press 'q' to quit.

Let's add some messages to Sup. In order for Sup to know about a
message, it must be in the index. In order for Sup to load a message
into the index, it must know about the "source" in which it
resides. Sup works by storing all the information that is necessary to
search, and all the state we have about the message (labels,
read/unread, etc.) in the index, but not storing the actual contents
of the message itself. So when you search or show your inbox, Sup just
talks to the index (stored locally on disk), and when you view a
message, Sup requests it in full from the to the source.

So let's tell Sup about some sources. Run 'sup-import' with a URI
pointing to an email source. The URI should be of the form:
- mbox://path/to/a/filename, for an mbox file on disk. (You can also
  just provide the filename).
- imap://imap.server/folder or imaps://secure.imap.server/folder for
  an IMAP folder. (Leave the folder blank for INBOX.)
- mbox+ssh://remote.machine/path/to/a/filename for a remote mbox file.

Before you actually import message, you need to decide whether you
want messages them to be archived or not. An archived message will not
show up in your inbox. (Your inbox is, by definition, all non-archived
messages). If you specify --force-archive, messages imported at *this*
time will be archived, but new messages will go to your inbox. If you
specify --archive, messages imported at *any* time will be
automatically archived. (This is useful for sources that contain
high-traffic mailing lists that you don't want "polluting" your
inbox.)

Typically you'll want to specify --archive for every source you import
except your actual inbox. You can also force all messages to be marked
as read; run sup-import --help for details. (The default is to
preserve the read/unread status from the source.)

Run sup-import to add the source. You can run it on multiple sources
at once if you want to apply the same set of flags to all of them. If
sup-import requires a username and password for the source, it will
prompt you for one. Either way, it will add the sources to Sup, and
immediately start loading messages from them into the index. Depending
on the size of the source, this may take some time. Don't worry! This
is a one-time process, and all the computation done now makes actually
using the index faster.

Now, before we run 'sup' again, take a moment to edit your
~/.sup/config.yaml file. Replace "Your Name Here" with your name,
"your.email.here@domain.tld" with your email address, and fill in your
.signature file if you choose. You can also set the default editor.

Ok, we're finally ready---run 'sup'. You should see messages being
loaded into your inbox from the index. Congratulations!

If you're coming from the world of traditional email, there are a
couple differences you should be aware of at this point. First, Sup
does not use folders. Instead, you organize and find messages by a
combination of search and labels (knowns as 'tags' everywhere else in
the world). I like to say that 95% of the functionality of folders is
superceded by a quick, easy-to-access, and powerful search mechanism,
and the other 5% by labels. The Sup statement of philosophy has a
little more on this. We'll get to search in a moment, but if you're
unfamiliar with labels, they're just any arbitrary word that you can
attach to a message, and any message can have zero or more labels. So
you can think of folders as labels in the case where you're restricted
to exactly one label per message.

The reason this works at all is due to the second thing you should be
aware of: in Sup, rather than viewing the contents of a folder, you
view the results of a search. I mentioned above that your inbox is, by
definition, the set of all messages that aren't archived. This means
that your inbox, in fact the result of the search for "all messages
without the label 'archive'. (It's actually slightly more complicated
than that---we omit killed, deleted and spam messages as well.)

So you could replicate the folder experience easily under this scheme,
by giving each message exactly one label and only viewing the results
of simple searches for those labels. But you'd quickly find out that
life can be easier than that if you just trust the search engine and
use labels judiciously to find those things that are too hard with
search. (The best label I've seen someone use: "contact-info".)

But enough chit-chat. Let's take a look at your inbox. You'll see that
Sup groups messages together into threads: each line in the inbox is a
thread, and the number in parentheses is the number of messages in
that thread. (If there's no number, it means there's just one
message.) In Sup, you rarely operate on an individual message. The
idea is that you rarely want to operate on a message independent of
its context; you typically want to view, archive, kill, or label all
the messages in a given thread at one time.

Use the up and down arrows to highlight a thread. ('j' and 'k' do the
same thing, and 'J' and 'K' will scroll the whole window, just like
scroll-lock used to. Even the left and right arrow keys work!) By
default, Sup only loads as many threads as it takes to fill the
window; if you'd like to load more, press 'M'. You can hit tab to
cycle between only threads with new messages.

Highlight a thread and press enter to view it. You'll notice that all
messages in the thread are displayed together, and their relationship
is shown graphically (replies are nested under parents). By default,
only the new messages in a thread are expanded, and the others are
hidden. You can toggle an individual message's state by highlighting a
green line and pressing enter. You can use 'E' to expand or collapse
all messages, and 'N' to expand only the new messages.  You'll also
notice that Sup hides quoted text and signatures. If you highlight a
particular one, you can press enter to expand it, or you can press 'o'
to toggle every hidden section in a particular message. (Don't worry
about remembering all these things---you can hit '?' to see the full
list at any point.)

A few other useful commands while viewing a thread. Press 'd' to
toggle a detailed header. If you've scrolled too far to the right,
press '[' to jump all the way to the left. Finally, you can press 'n'
and 'p' to jump forward and backward between open messages. (I find
that very useful!)

Now press 'x' to kill that buffer. You should see the inbox again. If
you don't, you can cycle through the buffers by pressing 'b', or you
can press 'A' to see a list of all buffers and simply select the
inbox.

There are many operations you can perform on threads beyond viewing
them. To archive a thread, press 'a'. The thread will disappear from
your inbox, but will still appear in search results. If someone
replies to the thread, it will reappear in your inbox. To kill a
thread, press '&'. Killed threads will never come back to your inbox,
even if people reply (but will still be searchable). This is useful
for those interminable threads that you really have no interest in.

If a thread is spam, press 'S'. It will disappear and won't come
back. It won't even appear in search results (unless you explicitly
search for spam.)

You can also star a thread by pressing '*'. Starred threads are
displayed with a little yellow asterix next to them, but otherwise
have no functionality. (But you can also search for them
easily---we'll see how in a moment).

To edit the labels for (all the messages in) a thread, press 'l'. Type
in the labels as a sequence of space-separated words. To cancel the
input, press Ctrl-G.

Many of these operations can be applied to a group of threads. Press
't' to tag a thread. Tag a couple, then press ';' to apply the next
command to the set of threads. ';t', of course, will untag all tagged
messages.

Ok, let's use labels and search. Press 'L' to bring up a list of all
the labels you've ever used, along with some special labels (Draft,
Starred, Spam, etc.). Highlight a label and press enter to view all
the messages with that label.

To search, press "/" and type in your query (again, Ctrl-G to cancel
at any point.) You can just type in arbitrary text, which will be
matched against the bodies of all email in the index, or you can make
use of the full Ferret query syntax:

- Phrasal queries using double-quotes, e.g.: "three contiguous words"
- Queries against a particular field using <field name>:<query>,
  e.g.: label:ruby-talk, or from:matz@ruby-lang.org. (Fields include:
  body, from, to, and subject.)
- Force occurrence and non-occurrence with + and -, e.g. +label:spam, or
  -body:"hot soup"

You can combine those all together. For example:
     +label:ruby-talk +subject:\[ANN\] -rails

Play around with the search, and see the Ferret documentation for
details on more sophisticated queries (date ranges, "within n words",
etc.)

At this point, you're well on your way to figuring out all the cool
things Sup can do. With judicious use of the '?' key, see if you can
figure out how to:
 - List your recent contacts
 - Add someone to your address book
 - Easily search for all mail from a recent contact
 - Postpone a message (i.e., save a draft)
 - Quickly re-edit a just-saved draft message
 - View the raw header of a message

Have fun, and let me know if you have any problems. --William