Subject: [sup-talk] Gmail IMAP with sup

From: [email-masked] (Miles Pomeroy)
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:30:37 -0700

Setup:
I'm a new user of sup trying use it will my gmail account. I set it up
using imaps://imap.gmail.com:993/INBOX. Sup went through and indexed
the 2000 some odd emails in my inbox and then present them to me just
fine, great.

The problem:
1. When new mail come in sup downloads it but it is not marked new. At
least not in anyway that I can distinguish from other messages.
2. When I look at those messages and then go back to gmail through the
browser, those messages are not marked as being read.

The question:
Does anyone else use gmail imap with sup? If so did you set it up
differently than I? Am I doing something wrong? Is there any tutorial
for setting up gmail imap specifically for sup?

Thanks,
Miles.

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From: [email-masked] (Jeff Balogh)
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:46:45 -0400

> least not in anyway that I can distinguish from other messages.

I don't know the cause of that.

> browser, those messages are not marked as being read.

This is part of the sup philosophy.  It treats mail sources as dumb stores, and
doesn't try to change them.

> for setting up gmail imap specifically for sup?

I used to run sup on gmail imap, using the '[Gmail]/All Mail' folder (which you
need to url encode as '%5BGmail%5D/All%20Mail').

I got tired of the imap slowness though, and switched to using offlineimap, so I
haven't had sup talking to gmail in a while.

-- jeff

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:16:57 -0700

> least not in anyway that I can distinguish from other messages.

Are these messages already read in Gmail? Sup tries its best to preserve
the status of messages that it imports. If not, then that sounds like a
legitimate bug.

> for setting up gmail imap specifically for sup?

There's no tutorial, at least not yet. What Jeff said is best practice
at this point---most everyone has switched to offlineimap as an
intermediate layer because Gmail (and possibly the Ruby IMAP libraries)
isn't fast enough for loading large threads.

-- 
William <wmorgan-sup at masanjin.net>

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From: [email-masked] (Kendall Grant Clark)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:30:20 -0400

Excerpts from William Morgan's message of Wed Apr 16 11:16:57 -0400 2008:

> intermediate layer

Is there a known-good description of how to switch to offlineimap? I
couldn't find anything on the wiki and I don't need to switch until or
unless it's not experimental. I'd rather endure some thread slowness
than lose mail, etc.

-- 
Cheers,
Kendall

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From: [email-masked] (Marc Hartstein)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:15:09 -0400

> isn't fast enough for loading large threads.

Just curious, why do people prefer offlineimap to fetchmail (using
either IMAP or POP protocols)?  Given that sup doesn't write back to the
store, so you're not getting the IMAP advantage of sending read status
back to the server...
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From: [email-masked] (Chris Warrington)
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:02:10 -0500 (CDT)

> store, so you're not getting the IMAP advantage of sending read status

* Easier to setup
* Easier to na\:\ively backup
* I can sync changes back easily if I modify with a different local client

-- 
Christopher Warrington <chrisw at rice.edu>
(away from his normal computer)

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From: [email-masked] (Miles Pomeroy)
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:25:57 -0700

> doesn't try to change them.

If this is part of sup philosophy then I'm assuming that it's not  
going to change. Can someone explain to me why this is a good thing? I  
use multiple computers and would like to use multiple clients to check  
my email, but this philosophy seems to only allow for one computer,  
one client.

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From: [email-masked] (William Morgan)
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:45:28 -0700

Reformatted excerpts from Miles Pomeroy's message of 2008-04-28:
> > This is part of the sup philosophy.  It treats mail sources as dumb
> > stores, and doesn't try to change them.
> 

That's a good question and it deserves explanation.

There are two issues. The first is simply pragmatic. Sup is never going
to be able to compete with programs like Mutt in terms of operations
like "open up a mailstore of some format X, and mark a bunch of messages
as read, and move a bunch of messages to this other mailstore." That's a
tremendous amount of work to get right, get safe and get fast, and
Mutt's already done it well, and I sure don't want to have to
reimplement it.

The other issue is more philosophical, and that's that I ultimately view
Sup as more of a service than as a MUA (even though it currently only
has itself as a client and has been masquerading as a MUA for its entire
life). I think the things that make Sup interesting and useful are the
indexing and the flags, and those are things that don't translate to
known mailstores at all. So in terms of multi-computer access, I would
rather invest time in building up a sup-server program (which has been
discussed here before, and I'm coming around to the idea, especially in
light of things like Thrift) or a sup webserver (which currently exists
in a proof-of-concept form) than to invest time in things that don't
play to Sup's strengths.

That said, if someone handed me a bunch of patches that does write back
read/unread status to mailstores of whatever formats, I'd be more than
happy to incorporate them. I'm just personally not going to spend a lot
of development time on those features.