Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

dolby · 2008-01-04 05:54:41

i found an interesting article on freshmeat about an ncurses email client called sup, which emulates gmails behaviour in the console. the project seems very promising as can be seen in the official webpage.
sadly its written in ruby and has some weird dependencies, some of which are not yet part of Arch, even AUR.
i will try and get it installed and tested later. thought id share for now

phrakture · 2008-01-04 07:29:26

I've been thinking of trying this out recently. I'd love to use mutt (or any console-based email reader, for that matter) much more, but I can't seem to tear myself away from gmail's web interface.

patroclo7 · 2008-01-04 13:38:45

Absolutely nice! I am starting to use it and it is already really usable. May be not so much documented however, and I am not still able to make ti work with my LOCALE and CHARSET.

I would like to make PKGBUILDs for the AUR, but it is really a long work, because it has 10-15 ruby dependencies which are not actually in any repo. Moreover I am not yet in touch with arch naming and compiling policy for ruby packages (I guess that it is similar to the perl one). For the time being I have resolved all the dependencies with rubygems.

smurnjiff · 2008-01-04 18:11:08

I used it and got it working. I didn't like the rubygems dependency though. I really like how it contains a snippet of the message - just like GMail.

patroclo7 · 2008-01-04 19:24:02

sup-sync fails for me on large mailboxes (more than 2000), both maildirs and mboxes. I have fixed the charset, but I am not able to convince sup to use my .mailcap.

codemac · 2008-01-05 02:18:30

Sup's problem is more that sup-sync fails on large mailboxes, and Ferret chokes on badly formed emails instead of just skipping over.

I have to say, emacs' Gnus has been pleasantly surprising.

patroclo7 · 2008-01-05 02:25:20

Just for completeness, in order to use .mailcap it needs the debianish run-mailcap executable

marte · 2008-01-06 03:28:34

oh man..!!
io'm fuckin drunk, and i have passed some days tryn to config the mutt + stuff to work with my gmail account... and i didn't made the thing work, but now i've seen this topic and are again hope to don't use the thunderbird-too-heavy-to-my-pentium3-pc, and i'll try to repl← this topic better tomorrow

luckyfor us all...!

F · 2008-01-06 03:31:11

seeing as how all I use is gmail, this looks very promising...

patroclo7 · 2008-01-06 11:05:54

There are some bugs and missing features, but it is REALLY promising. The general ideas of the interface and the threads-archives system are among the best ideas around. Probably I should study a bit of ruby in order to fix the issues.

For the moment being, my best use of sup is to conjoin it with offlineimap in order to access my gmail account through imap. On the contrary it is very slow and not so reliable in accessing imap folders directly.

print · 2008-01-30 02:58:34

patroclo7 wrote:

There are some bugs and missing features, but it is REALLY promising. The general ideas of the interface and the threads-archives system are among the best ideas around. Probably I should study a bit of ruby in order to fix the issues.
For the moment being, my best use of sup is to conjoin it with offlineimap in order to access my gmail account through imap. On the contrary it is very slow and not so reliable in accessing imap folders directly.

1 Gmail has IMAP support.
2 Thanks for the .mailcap info . . . did you ever do this:
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/sup-talk … 00805.html

Can't find mailcap using pacman or yaourt

Last edited by print (2008-01-30 03:02:13)

patroclo7 · 2008-01-30 08:00:24

Yes, Gmail has imap support, but, as I pointed out in the sup-talk mailing list, I think that there is a certain incompatibility between sup philosophy and imap philosophy: the point of imap is to access to the same structure of folders from several interfaces, with a real-time synchronizations of the actions from the different interfaces. But sup does not use folders at all and, admittedly, does not play well with others (the ferret index is confused when even a single flag has been changed by another mail client, or in the web interface if gmail). Thus, I do not see any advantage in using sup directly as an imap client with gmail: you get the slowness of the fetching of imap headers at each polling and you can not anymore use the gmail web interface. There are two solutions: either you use offlineimap or isync with an unidirectional syncing (so that nothing is screwed in sup's index), or you go back to pop3 with maildirs or mboxes (sup works fine with both). I have chosen this second scenarios (basically because the fetchers for pop3 are ATM lighter and stabler than the imap syncers, and all the additional benefits of imap access would be nonetheless lost).

I like so much sup that I have been happy to modify accordingly my email setup. Moreover, in this last month sup greatly improved and does not choke anymore on large maildirs.

About the second point, no, I haven't, I will do when I find the time to package sup and all its dependencies. Anyway you have simply to take the .deb from a debian repository, convert it with deb2targz, untar the archive, and copy run-mailcap (which is a perl script) somewhere in you path and make it executable (I did not find a place where it is possible to download the script directly without this routine: if you find it than it would be much simpler to put it in the AUR). Anyway, the script is now here:
http://www.patroclo7.org/archlinux/sup/run-mailcap

Last edited by patroclo7 (2008-01-30 08:06:31)

schivmeister · 2008-01-30 18:59:59

phrakture wrote:

but I can't seem to tear myself away from gmail's web interface.

+1

print · 2008-01-30 19:26:41

schivmeister wrote:

phrakture wrote:
but I can't seem to tear myself away from gmail's web interface.
+1

Software that encourages top posting: -1

print · 2008-01-30 19:34:21

patroclo7 wrote:

Yes, Gmail has imap support, but, as I pointed out in the sup-talk mailing list, I think that there is a certain incompatibility between sup philosophy and imap philosophy: the point of imap is to access to the same structure of folders from several interfaces, with a real-time synchronizations of the actions from the different interfaces. But sup does not use folders at all and, admittedly, does not play well with others (the ferret index is confused when even a single flag has been changed by another mail client, or in the web interface if gmail). Thus, I do not see any advantage in using sup directly as an imap client with gmail: you get the slowness of the fetching of imap headers at each polling and you can not anymore use the gmail web interface. There are two solutions: either you use offlineimap or isync with an unidirectional syncing (so that nothing is screwed in sup's index), or you go back to pop3 with maildirs or mboxes (sup works fine with both). I have chosen this second scenarios (basically because the fetchers for pop3 are ATM lighter and stabler than the imap syncers, and all the additional benefits of imap access would be nonetheless lost).

I'll have to give POP a try . . . I noticed what you're describing; i.e., inconsistencies between the sups on my laptop and server.

patroclo7 wrote:

I like so much sup that I have been happy to modify accordingly my email setup. Moreover, in this last month sup greatly improved and does not choke anymore on large maildirs.
About the second point, no, I haven't, I will do when I find the time to package sup and all its dependencies. Anyway you have simply to take the .deb from a debian repository, convert it with deb2targz, untar the archive, and copy run-mailcap (which is a perl script) somewhere in you path and make it executable (I did not find a place where it is possible to download the script directly without this routine: if you find it than it would be much simpler to put it in the AUR). Anyway, the script is now here:
http://www.patroclo7.org/archlinux/sup/run-mailcap

Yeah, I just use gem to install Ruby stuff. Have you seen this similar, more recent thread?
http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/sup-talk … 01081.html

The system call in ~/.sup/hooks/mime-view.rb opens html attachments as expected in an external firefox process, but I can't get elinks to dump to the console. Any ideas? I suppose I could just post this to the sup-talk mailing list instead

TIA

Agent69 · 2008-01-30 19:35:19

phrakture wrote:

I've been thinking of trying this out recently. I'd love to use mutt (or any console-based email reader, for that matter) much more, but I can't seem to tear myself away from gmail's web interface.

Gmail was a real boon for me, as I hated configuring Sendmail/Postfix/Fetchmail. That said, I have been thinking about running Fetchmail via Cron to occasionally pull down my email from Google for backup purposes (even Mutt's built in POP support would probably work for backup purposes).

Is anyone here doing something like that now?

patroclo7 · 2008-01-30 22:19:39

@Agent69: I really think that for backup purposes (we are going completely off-topic, sup is a wonderful tool which reproduces the gmail experience on the console, but it is not designed for the kind of backup you have in mind) the best thing is to use IMAP access with offlineimap as a cron job: in this way everything (any flag whatever) is backed up perfectly, and any occasional change made with mutt is backed up on the server as well.

@print: I have only tried with firefox and w3m, may be you can play with the copiousoutput option and so in ~/.mailcap (I did not try the hook method, sorry).

dolby · 2008-01-31 11:58:48

print wrote:

schivmeister wrote:
phrakture wrote:
but I can't seem to tear myself away from gmail's web interface.
+1
Software that encourages top posting: -1

+1

Agent69 · 2008-01-31 12:36:35

print wrote:

schivmeister wrote:
phrakture wrote:
but I can't seem to tear myself away from gmail's web interface.
+1
Software that encourages top posting: -1

You might as well get over that. From what I have seen, most people top post and I think those of us who don't are a minority.

patroclo7 · 2008-01-31 13:31:08

Yeah, one should begin to say timidly that there is nothing so deeply mistaken or illogical in reading blocks of text from bottom to top and that all the geek obsession against top-posting is largely irrational. Also those custom signatures aiming to show how bad is top-posting has always seemed to me perfectly readable.

However I admit that i never top-post, basically to avoid pointless flamewars in open source mailing lists.

phrakture · 2008-01-31 20:06:29

I hate the top posting too, but a 20ish line greasemonkey script fixes it. (PS Irony)

dolby wrote:

print wrote:
schivmeister wrote:
+1
Software that encourages top posting: -1
+1

cactus · 2008-01-31 20:07:30

I agree with this.

phrakture wrote:

I hate the top posting too, but a 20ish line greasemonkey script fixes it. (PS Irony)
dolby wrote:
print wrote:
Software that encourages top posting: -1
+1

schivmeister · 2008-01-31 20:22:04

+ 1 - 1 + 1 = + 1!

Last edited by schivmeister (2008-01-31 20:22:28)

shining · 2008-01-31 21:27:06

Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

cactus wrote:

I agree with this.
phrakture wrote:
I hate the top posting too, but a 20ish line greasemonkey script fixes it. (PS Irony)
dolby wrote:
+1

semdornus · 2008-02-01 01:54:47

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.

shining wrote:

Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
cactus wrote:
I agree with this.
phrakture wrote:
I hate the top posting too, but a 20ish line greasemonkey script fixes it. (PS Irony)

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-01-04 05:54:41

Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#2 2008-01-04 07:29:26

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#3 2008-01-04 13:38:45

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#4 2008-01-04 18:11:08

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#5 2008-01-04 19:24:02

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#6 2008-01-05 02:18:30

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#7 2008-01-05 02:25:20

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#8 2008-01-06 03:28:34

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#9 2008-01-06 03:31:11

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#10 2008-01-06 11:05:54

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#11 2008-01-30 02:58:34

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#12 2008-01-30 08:00:24

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#13 2008-01-30 18:59:59

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#14 2008-01-30 19:26:41

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#15 2008-01-30 19:34:21

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#16 2008-01-30 19:35:19

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#17 2008-01-30 22:19:39

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#18 2008-01-31 11:58:48

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#19 2008-01-31 12:36:35

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#20 2008-01-31 13:31:08

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#21 2008-01-31 20:06:29

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#22 2008-01-31 20:07:30

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#23 2008-01-31 20:22:04

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#24 2008-01-31 21:27:06

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

#25 2008-02-01 01:54:47

Re: Sup: Gmail Meets the Console

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