Subject: [sup-talk] New to Sup and some imap sync questions

From: [email-masked] (Christopher Bertels)
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:49:04 +0200

Hi!
I'm new to using Sup and I really like it.
I know that it works a little different than most mail clients I've used before.
I'be been using Thunderbird but I#ve always missed a way to view my mails in one big inbox with multiple accounts.
Fortunately, Sup does this just the way I want it to. And since I like Ruby as well, it's definately another plus to be able to customize it with Ruby.
I do have one question though:
Are there any plans on making it sync changes back to the imap server somehow? I'm used to having different mail clients on different machines dealing with
the same accounts on several imap servers. I'm so used to having all the changes happening on the server itself, that it's something I'm really missing with Sup.
Just wondering if this is ever planned? Since now, even if I have Sup installed on my different machines, I still need to sync all the settings when I change something (e.g. adding a hook-script or something else). Or is there an easy way to sync my Sup settings  etc?
I'm new to it, but it seems very promising...

Thanks for any help and keep up the good work!

Christopher.

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From: [email-masked] (Edward Z. Yang)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:04:40 -0400

Excerpts from Christopher Bertels's message of Tue Apr 28 13:49:04 -0400 2009:
> Just wondering if this is ever planned? Since now, even if I have Sup installed
> on my different machines, I still need to sync all the settings when I change
> something (e.g. adding a hook-script or something else). Or is there an easy
> way to sync my Sup settings  etc?

Hello Christopher,

My current understanding is that William is not interested in mucking around
with IMAP any more than he has to, so unless someone steps up and submits
some patches there will not be syncing back to IMAP.

As for handling Sup on multiple machines, I think the current best practice
is "don't"; pick one machine, make it ssh'able into, and use that to handle
all of your mail.

Cheers,
Edward

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:09:16 -0700

Reformatted excerpts from Edward Z. Yang's message of 2009-04-29:
> My current understanding is that William is not interested in mucking
> around with IMAP any more than he has to, so unless someone steps up
> and submits some patches there will not be syncing back to IMAP.

That's pretty much the case, but I hope it's ameliorated by the fact
that I do plan to get sup-sync-back working with Maildir ("any day
now"), and then you can use offlineimap to really sync between IMAP and
Sup.

> As for handling Sup on multiple machines, I think the current best
> practice is "don't"; pick one machine, make it ssh'able into, and use
> that to handle all of your mail.

Correct.

Recently I've been thinking about the possibility of storing one's
mbox/Maildir in git, syncing it between machines (Maildir would probably
work best for this, as mbox will generate spurious conflicts when
deleting+adding), and maintaining the Ferret index locally on each
machine. If we add a notion of an outbound message queue to Sup (i.e.
each machine knows whether it has the ability to send mail or not), and
also synchronize that and the drafts and sent folders between machines,
you could use Sup for completely offline, distributed email. Crazy?
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

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From: [email-masked] (Edward Z. Yang)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:38:13 -0400

> you could use Sup for completely offline, distributed email. Crazy?

I was under the impression that the interesting stuff (e.g. tags) was
stored in the index, so you would have to sync that too?

Cheers,
Edward

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:16:30 -0700

> stored in the index, so you would have to sync that too?

That would have to be update to include all new messages every time you
synced. And the flags would have to be synced too. Not a trivial
undertaking, but within the realm of possibility.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

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From: [email-masked] (Christopher Bertels)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:48:35 +0200

> you could use Sup for completely offline, distributed email. Crazy?

Actually, that's something I've thought about as well. Seems kinda crazy, but since I don't switch between
machines too often (mainly laptop & desktop machine - maybe switching once a day) this could be an optoin.
Or I'll use my server and ssh into it to view my mail.
Anyhow, I guess I'll stick with Sup - I just like it too much already ;)

Christopher.

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:58:01 -0700

Reformatted excerpts from William Morgan's message of 2009-04-29:
> That would have to be update to include all new messages every time
> you synced. And the flags would have to be synced too. Not a trivial

That wasn't very clear. Let me try again. The Ferret index (a scary
binary thing) would not be synced. Individual sources would be synced,
along with some version of the message flags (probably as a
newline-separated text file, to allow conflict resolution (!)), and then
the index would be updated on the local machine to reflect those
changes.

Kinda tantamount to rsyncing your .sup directory and all your sources
across different machines, but a little more refined.
-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>