From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: 5srmspw02@sneakemail.com (Guarded Identity)
Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:39:18 -0600
Subject: [sup-talk] New User Questions
Message-ID: <29393-78803@sneakemail.com>

Hello everyone,

First off.  William, thanks a lot for all the work.  The Mutt home page
has always had this quote: "All mail clients suck. This one [mutt] just
sucks less."  I know Sup has room for more features and functionality,
but it my mind, it's no where near sucking, especially with the option
of using sup-console or Ruby scripts using Redwood libraries.

Having just gotten started, I have a slew of questions.  I'll try to
organize/enumerate them below to help with in-line responses.

I'm using maildirs as opposed to mboxes.  I've always preferred maildirs
over mboxes to avoid dealing with gigantic mail files.

   1. Can sent mail only be stored in an mbox, or are other formats
      supported?

I haven't gotten around to digging deeply into Sup's source, so I'm not
sure about the details of how E-mails are indexed.  I know Sup doesn't
play well with other MUAs.  The FAQ discusses mboxes pretty well.  I was
hoping for a little more discussion of how modification of maildir mail
by other MUAs affects Sup.  For instance, the maildir specification has
mail put in $MAILDIR/new/ until read by a MUA, which should move the
mail to $MAILDIR/cur/ to mark the mail as "seen".

   2. Will migration of maildir mail from new/ to cur/ necessitate an
      execution of sup-sync?

Also, "read" flags (and others) are stored in the Maildir filename.

   3. If the filename of maildir mail changes, is a sup-sync required?

If 2. or 3. are indeed problems, maybe I could front the maildir sources
with an IMAP server.  I had done this before, actually, but I noticed
that Sup indexing was slowed down quite a bit (rss2email and mailing
lists generate a lot of new mail).  If I do go with IMAP, I guess I
could sequence a sup-sync right after my crontab call to fetchmail to
help with indexing?  I just wasn't keen on Sup being locked out
periodically by crontab.

Alternatively, I could move all my Maildirs into mboxes.  I know Sup has
a bias towards not deleting mail, but sup-sync-back is there for mboxes.

   4. How far away is sup-sync-back support for maildirs or IMAP?  Is
      the work straight-forward or are there some technical kinks to be
      ironed out?

   5. Should I consider using mboxes for any reason beyond support by
      sup-sync-back?

Also, I would really like to have time-based auto-expiry (excluding
starred or special-labeled items) for some of my mail (primarily mailing
lists and rss feeds).  With mboxes, I guess I could do some
"deleted"-labeling with a Ruby script followed by a call to
sup-sync-back.
    
   6. What are my scripting options for mail expiry with Maildirs?  The
      search to get the message objects is pretty straight forward.  How
      much further work is it to delete the message from the index and
      to get a filename of the message to delete from the maildir?

Also, I kind of miss urlview.

   7. Any proposal for easily opening urls from messages?  
    
      urlview is already coded up, so I'm all for a mechanism for piping
      messages into an external application.  But this leads to other
      design issues, I think, like how to enable user-level key
      bindings.

I have few questions regarding hooks and threading:

   8. I'm a little confused about threading interacts with labeling in
      Sup.  Labels are applied to entire threads, but it seems that
      labels are stored on a per-mail basis.  Is seems possible for
      message within a thread to have different labels, say by using a
      before-add-message.rb hook.  Is the label set for the thread a
      union of all the labels of its constituents?
    
   9. If a new message comes into a thread, is it auto-labeled with the
      labels of the thread?

  10. I tried to do some auto-archiving with the before-add-message.rb
      hook using message.remove_label("inbox"), but it didn't work.  Is
      this possible?  Or is auto-archiving only possible at the source
      level?

Finally. . .

  11. Is it possible to search for mail that has no labels without saying
      "!label:label1 AND !label:label2 AND ..."?

      I looked a little in the Ferret documentation, but didn't find a
      way.  I was trying to do this to get at some mail I archived
      accidentally before applying labels.

That's what I've got for now.  I hope I didn't overwhelm the list with a
lot of stupid questions.

Thanks for your help,
Sukant