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Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

supmua.org

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#11
post #9
post #4

I've been thinking about switching to sup a few times, but the inability to sync changes back to the IMAP server is a deal breaker to me. If I mark an email as read in sup, I don't want it to show up as unread on my phone. If I delete an email on the phone, I don't want it to stay in sup. I know there's been a branch of sup that synced IMAP flags from the local repo to the server, solving at least the read status pro…

FWIW, I never considered that a serious limitation. On my phone, I don’t want to read email. It’s a sub-par experience, especially if you’re used to Sup/Gmail/Notmuch. You can’t just go back to “regular” email clients anymore :). As for using multiple computers: with sup I used to run it in screen and attach that screen session whenever I needed it. With notmuch, I can just tell it to run notmuch(1) on a remote machi…

I do some email using my phone when on the go, and although I'd like a better sync experience, it's not a showstopper. OfflineIMAP (buggy as hell, but works) can sync unread and flagged/starred status, which is the most important part. In a normal day where I mostly use notmuch, I just batch-archive the day's messages. I don't like the latency of using a remote notmuch, especially when going through a string of 5MB log files (remote debugging a user's mis-configuration) on conference wireless or while tethering.

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#12
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this go beyond what you can do with mutt? Plus mutt handles IMAP out of the box.

It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox, and when you open it, you get all the messages of the thread (with read messages collapsed), instead of precisely one message. Edit: also fast (!) full-text search thanks to Xapian, tags instead of folders

Unfortunately this won't install on my mac. After playing with it for a while I'm giving up... because I simply don't have the time.

Too bad, I was really excited about this.

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#13
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this go beyond what you can do with mutt? Plus mutt handles IMAP out of the box.

It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox, and when you open it, you get all the messages of the thread (with read messages collapsed), instead of precisely one message. Edit: also fast (!) full-text search thanks to Xapian, tags instead of folders

> It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox

folder-hook . "exec collapse-all"

set sort=threads

set sort_aux=last-date-received

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#14
I've been a mutt user since around 1997, and elm and mail before that.

I now do something crazy with maildir sync via mbsync and then mutt. Works pretty well. This lets me use push mail from an EAS (Kerio or Z-push) server on the iPhone to get push email, as well as getting mail on a few computers, all with full local archives. I just use the mail server for webmail in the cases I need to use it, but kerio's webmail is pretty crap.

Unclear what benefit sup gives over mutt. Mutt's killer feature is folder hooks, I think. I can't think of anything which can't be done with folder hooks, other than maybe tags, which I just solve with full-text search.

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#16
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this go beyond what you can do with mutt? Plus mutt handles IMAP out of the box.

It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox, and when you open it, you get all the messages of the thread (with read messages collapsed), instead of precisely one message. Edit: also fast (!) full-text search thanks to Xapian, tags instead of folders

Sooo... it's pine?

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#17

When I was using NetBSD in 2001 I actually liked the built-in "mail" command to read email. It was very minimal. Sadly, I could never figure out how to handle attachments with it.

"mail" is actually a fantastic interface to an email box assuming you don't receive very much mail. I still use it for things like sending myself an email notification when a long-running job is finished.

Maybe this wasn't the case back then, but with the mailx the comes with modern Linux distros you can attach files using the -a flag

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#19
post #4

I've been thinking about switching to sup a few times, but the inability to sync changes back to the IMAP server is a deal breaker to me. If I mark an email as read in sup, I don't want it to show up as unread on my phone. If I delete an email on the phone, I don't want it to stay in sup. I know there's been a branch of sup that synced IMAP flags from the local repo to the server, solving at least the read status pro…

The genealogically related 'notmuch' can do that: by default it syncs certain notmuch tags (like read/unread) with Maildir flags, and then you can sync Maildir with IMAP using something like offlineimap.

Re: Sup: The Hacker's Mail User Agent

#20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox, and when you open it, you get all the messages of the thread (with read messages collapsed), instead of precisely one message. Edit: also fast (!) full-text search thanks to Xapian, tags instead of folders

> It mimics the gmail look & feel, i.e. one line of text represents one thread in your inbox folder-hook . "exec collapse-all" set sort=threads set sort_aux=last-date-received

Yup. I do this since I'm used to za in Vim for toggling folds:

    # Collapse all threads by default, except if 
    # there's new mail in one.
    unset collapse_unread
    folder-hook . "exec collapse-all"
    # Toggle collapsed threads with za, like in vim.
    bind index za collapse-thread
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