Sup FAQ
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Q: What does Sup stand for?
A: It stands for "what's up?", which is more or less the question in
   mind when I fire up my mail client.

Q: If you love GMail so much, why not just use it?
A: I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate non-programmability
   and non-extensibility.

   Also, GMail encourages top-posting. THIS CANNOT BE TOLERATED!

Q: Why the console?
A: Because a keystroke is with a hundred mouse clicks (as any Unix
   user knows). Because you don't need web browser. Because you get
   instantaneous response and a simple interface.

Q: How does Sup deal with spam?
A: You can manually mark messages as spam, which prevents them from
   showing up in future searches, but that's as far as Sup goes. Spam
   filtering should be done by a dedicated tool like SpamAssassin.

Q: How do I delete a message?
A: Why delete? Unless it's spam, you might as well just archive it.

Q: C'mon, really now!
A: Ok, press the 'd' key.

Q: But I want to delete it for real, not just add a 'deleted' flag in
   the index. I want it gone from disk!
A: Ok, at some point I plan to have a batch deletion tool that will
   run through a source and delete all messages that have a 'spam' or
   'deleted' tags. But that doesn't exist yet.

Q: I got some error message about needing to run sup-sync --changed
   when I tried to read a message. What's that about?
A: If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered in a source, Sup
   may have to rebuild its index for that source. For example, for
   mbox files, reading a single unread message changes the offsets of
   every file on disk. Rather than rescanning every time, Sup assumes
   sources don't change except by having new messages added. If that
   assumption is violated, you'll have to sync the index.

   The alternative is to rescan every source when Sup starts
   up. Because Sup is designed to work with arbitrarily large mbox
   files, this would not be a good idea.

Q: How do I back up my index?
Q: How do I make a state dump?
A: Since the contents of the messages are recoverable from their
   sources using sup-sync, all you need to back up is the message
   state. To do this, simply run:
      sup-dump > <dumpfile>
   This will save all message state in a big text file, which you
   should probably compress.

Q: How do I restore the message state I saved in my state dump?
A: Run:
     sup-sync [<source>+] --restored --restore <dumpfile>
   where <dumpfile> was created as above.

Q: I see this message from Ferret:
     Error occured in index.c:825 - sis_find_segments_file
A: Yikes! You've upgraded Ferret and the index format changed beneath
   you. Follow the index rebuild instructions below.

Q: I upgraded Ferret and the index format changed. I need to
   completely rebuild my index. How do I do this?
A: First, you'll need a complete state dump. If you haven't made
   one, you'll need to downgrade Ferret and make a state dump as
   above. Then run these commands:
     rm -rf ~/.sup/ferret    # omg wtf
     sup-sync --all-sources --all --restore <dumpfile>
   Voila! A brand new index.

Q: I want to move messages from one source to another. (E.g., my
   primary inbox is an IMAP server with a quota, and I want to move
   some of those messages to local mbox files.) How do I do that while
   preserving message state?
A: Move the messages from the source to the target using whatever tool
   you'd like. Then (and this is the important part), run:
     sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>

   If you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on the order,
   the messages may be treated as missing and then deleted from the
   index, which means that their state will be lost when you sync the
   other source.

Q: What are all these "Redwood" references I see in the code?
A: That was Sup's original name. (Think pine, elm. Although I am a
   Mutt user, I couldn't think of a good progression there.) But it was
   taken by another project on RubyForge, and wasn't that original,
   and was too long to type anyways.

   Maybe one day I'll do a huge search-and-replace on the code, but it
   doesn't seem that important at this point.

Q: How is Sup possible?
A: Sup is only possible through the hard work of Dave Balmain, the
   author of ferret, which is the search engine behind Sup. Ferret is
   really a first-class piece of software, and it's due to the
   tremendous amount of time and effort he's put in to it.

