doc/FAQ.txt (4814B) - raw
1 Sup FAQ
2 -------
3
4 Q: What is Sup?
5 A: A console-based email client for people with a lot of email.
6
7 Q: What does Sup stand for?
8 A: "What's up?"
9
10 Q: Sup looks like a text-based Gmail.
11 A: First I stole their ideas. Then I improved them.
12
13 Q: Why not just use Gmail?
14 A: I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate non-programmability and
15 non-extensibility.
16
17 Also, Gmail doesn't let you use a monospace font, which is just
18 lame.
19
20 Also, Gmail encourages top-posting. THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED!
21
22 Q: Why the console?
23 A: Because a keystroke is worth a hundred mouse clicks, as any Unix
24 user knows. Because you don't need a web browser. Because you get
25 an instantaneous response and a simple interface.
26
27 Q: How does Sup deal with spam?
28 A: You can manually mark messages as spam, which prevents them from
29 showing up in future searches. Later, you can run a batch process to
30 remove such messages from your sources. That's as far as Sup goes.
31 Spam filtering should be done by a dedicated tool like SpamAssassin.
32
33 Q: How do I delete a message?
34 A: Why delete? Unless it's spam, you might as well just archive it.
35
36 Q: C'mon, really now!
37 A: Ok, press the 'd' key.
38
39 Q: But I want to delete it for real, not just add a 'deleted' flag in
40 the index. I want it gone from disk!
41 A: Currently, for mbox sources, there is a batch deletion tool that
42 will strip out all messages marked as spam or deleted.
43
44 Q: How well does Sup play with other mail clients?
45 A: Not well at all. If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered
46 due to some other client, Sup will have to rebuild its index for
47 that message source. For example, for mbox files, reading a single
48 unread message changes the offsets of every file on disk. Rather
49 than rescanning every time, Sup assumes sources don't change except
50 by having new messages added. If that assumption is violated,
51 you'll have to sync the index.
52
53 Q: How do I back up my index?
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:
57 sup-dump > <dumpfile>
58 This will save all message state in a big text file, which you
59 should probably compress.
60
61 Q: How do I restore the message state I saved in my state dump?
62 A: Run:
63 sup-sync [<source>+] --restored --restore <dumpfile>
64 where <dumpfile> was created as above.
65
66 Q: Xapian crashed and I can't read my index. Luckily I made a state
67 dump. What should I do?
68 Q: How do I rebuild the index completely?
69 A: Run:
70 rm -rf ~/.sup/xapian # omg wtf
71 sup-sync --all-sources --all --restore <dumpfile>
72 Voila! A brand new index.
73
74 Q: I want to move messages from one source to another. (E.g., my
75 primary inbox is an mbox file, and I want to move some of those
76 messages to a Maildir.) How do I do that while preserving message
77 state?
78 A: Move the messages from the source to the target using whatever tool
79 you'd like. Mutt's a good one. :) Then run:
80 sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>
81
82 Note that if you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on
83 the order in which you do it, the messages may be treated as
84 missing and then deleted from the index, which means that their
85 states will be lost when you sync the other source. So do them both
86 in one go.
87
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 was 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, and
92 was too long to type anyways.
93
94 Common Problems
95 ---------------
96
97 P: I get some error message from Rubymail about frozen strings when
98 importing messages with attachments.
99 S: The current solution is to directly modify RubyMail. Change line 159 of
100 multipart.rb to:
101 chunk = chunk[0..start]
102 This is because RubyMail hasn't been updated since like Ruby 1.8.2.
103 Please bug Matt Armstrong.
104
105 P: I see this error:
106 /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `transfer': allocator undefined for Bignum (TypeError)
107 S: You need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.5. YAML in earlier versions can't
108 parse BigNums, but Sup relies on that for Maildir.
109
110 P: When I run Sup remotely and view an HTML attachment, an existing
111 Firefox on the *local* machine is redirected to the attachment
112 file, which it can't find (since it's on the remote machine). How do
113 I view HTML attachments in this environment?
114 S: Put this in your ~/.mailcap on the machine you run Sup on:
115 text/html; /usr/bin/firefox -a sup %s; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html
116
117 Please read
118 https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup/wiki/Viewing-Attachments for
119 some security concerns on opening attachments.