|dreams

I got fed up with Mutt again and had a go at Sup. It looks very promising. It’s got great threading, tagging and search capabilities. It’s inspired by Gmail and Mutt, the two apps that top my list of email clients that suck less. Unfortunately there’s a deal breaker: It doesn’t play well with IMAP. Or it might be that IMAP doesn’t play well with Sup. In the words of Sups author William Morgan:

fucking imap fucking sucks. what the FUCK kind of committee of dunces designed this shit. … fuck you, imap committee. you managed to design something nearly as shitty as mbox but goddamn THIRTY YEARS LATER.

That might be true, but anyone looking to replace Mutt on my xterm most provide a realistic way of working with IMAP. Mutt doesn’t do IMAP that well but you can get around that by using OfflineIMAP. With Sup that’s not possible by design. Sup doesn’t alter your mailboxes, be they mbox, Maildir or IMAP. Instead it creates an index that is completely separate from the sources. If the source ever changes you need to run sup-sync. All syncing is one way. The labels you add in Sup will not show up in other clients. As a matter of fact nothing you do to your mail in Sup will affect what other clients sees.

I’m constantly accessing my email from lots of different clients. If the changes I do to mail mailboxes through my Treo doesn’t show up in my webmail or in the console based clients I’m forced to duplicate that work. Since Sup doesn’t do any changes to your mailboxes it won’t even mark emails as read, much less move mail from your inbox to some other location. All that metadata is instead in a database.