Sup FAQ
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Q: What is Sup?
A: Sup is a console-based email client for people with a lot of email.
   It supports tagging, very fast full-text search, automatic contact-
   list management, custom code insertion via a hook system, and more.
   If you're the type of person who treats email as an extension of your
   long-term memory, Sup is for you.

Q: What does Sup stand for?
A: "What's up?"

Q: Sup looks like a text-based Gmail.
A: I stole their ideas. And improved them!

Q: Why not just use Gmail?
A: I wrote Sup because I hate ads, I hate using a mouse, and I hate
   non-programmability and non-extensibility.

   Also, Gmail doesn't let you use a monospace font, which is just
   lame.

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

Q: Why the console?
A: Because a keystroke is worth 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: Currently, for mbox sources, there is a batch deletion tool that
   will strip out all messages marked as spam or deleted.

Q: How well does Sup play with other mail clients?
A: Not well at all. If messages have been moved, deleted, or altered
   due to some other client, Sup will have to rebuild its index for
   that message 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.

Q: How do I back up my index?
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: Ferret crashed and I can't read my index. Luckily I made a state
   dump. What should I do?
Q: How do I rebuild the index completely?
A: Run:
     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. Mutt's a good one. :) Then run:
     sup-sync --changed <source1> <source2>

   Note that if you sup-sync only one source at a time, depending on
   the order in which you do it, the messages may be treated as
   missing and then deleted from the index, which means that their
   states will be lost when you sync the other source. So do them both
   in one go.

Q: What are all these "Redwood" references I see in the code?
A: That was Sup's original name. (Think pine, elm. Although I was 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.

Common Problems
---------------

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

P: I get some error message from Rubymail about frozen strings when
   importing messages with attachments.
S: The current solution is to directly modify RubyMail. Change line 159 of
   multipart.rb to:
     chunk = chunk[0..start]
   This is because RubyMail hasn't been updated since like Ruby 1.8.2.
   Please bug Matt Lickey.

P: I see this error:
     /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/yaml.rb:133:in `transfer': allocator undefined for Bignum (TypeError)
S: You need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.5. YAML in earlier versions can't
   parse BigNums, but Sup relies on that for Maildir and IMAP.

P: I see this error:
     /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/imap.rb:204: uninitialized constant Net::IMAP::SSL (NameError)
S: You need to install a package called libssl-ruby or something similar.
   Or, don't use imaps:// sources. Ruby's IMAP library otherwise fails in
   this completely uninformative manner.

P: When I run Sup remotely and view an HTML attachment, an existing
   Firefox on the *local* machine is redirected to the attachment
   file, which it can't find (since it's on the remote machine). How do
   I view HTML attachments in this environment?
S: Put this in your ~/.mailcap on the machine you run Sup on:
      text/html; /usr/bin/firefox -a sup '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";  nametemplate=%s.html
