Sup
There’s a new email client in town. It’s still brand squeaking new, but it
shows promise. It’s called Sup.
If you have a love-hate relationship with GMail, Sup may be for you. It takes
some of the excellent things about GMail, improves on them, and dispenses with
most of the antiexcellent things about GMail. For example, it’s console-based
(a la mutt), you can use your favorite editor to edit mail (again, a la mutt),
and you have real threads instead of flat pseudo-thread “conversations”.
If I had to describe it in a few words, I’d say it was a gmail and mutt mashup.
It looks really cool. I might give it a try, if I want to bad enough.
Unfortunately it looks like setting it up is not going to be a walk in the
park. It’s not that it’s particularly hard in any way, in fact the opposite. It
has an easy interactive (if slightly redneck) config program to get you up and
running quickly. The problem is that it has to know about all your mail
sources, and by that I mean all your mail folders in all your mail accounts. I
have dozens of folders in at least two accounts. Adding them by hand will not
be pleasant. With mutt, or thunderbird, or whatever, you either just access the
folders, or at least you subscribe to them. I understand the technical reason
(fast searching) but it’s just got to be easier to import existing folders and
elaborate procmail setups.
One of the benefits of the gmailesque “search and tag” approach to email is
making it easy to deal with folders and filters. I would expect, then, a way to
set up procmailesque automatic labelling (like gmail allows, but I’d really
prefer a procmailesque syntax). Even better, automatic labelling (and
archiving, perhaps by config) based on List-Id headers. Then joining and
leaving lists might just be easy enough that I’d consider doing it more
frequently (i.e. for bug reports). In fact, while I’m dreaming, one-touch
subscribe/unsubscribe to the list the current message came from would be way
cool.
It’s amazingly complete for beta version 0.1. I expected a half-baked client
with lots of bugs, but what I see is a fledgling mutt-like interface with
extreme potential and high usability even now. I expect to see more keybindings
as time goes on and people request them. I expect to see more hookability,
where you can do random whatevers e.g. when a certain regex is matched on a new
message, etc. I expect a little smarter security of my passwords. I expect
custom colorization (never was a big fan of default mutt colors), etc. All
these things I expect will come with time. It’s a promising client.
All mail clients suck. This one might just suck better.