"The goal of Sup is to become the email client of choice for nerds everywhere."
I encountered sup a few days ago via a link on Justin Mason's blog, and it sounded interesting enough to try it out. There are quite a few things about it that I like, but there are a few things about it that currently are just plain show-stoppers. None of them is irreparable, but IMO taken together they almost disqualify it from being called an "email client" at this time. First the good stuff: I entirely approve of the choices of ideas to borrow from gmail, and the addition of being able to mark and coalesce threads is something I wish gmail would borrow back. The key bindings weren't too hard to figure out (and probably would have been easier if I'd used mutt more in the past). The expanding/collapsing views of threads and quoted messages work nicely most of the time. I could immediately see how sup could help me clean up the mess some of my mail stores have become, to find and conceal old stuff without completely losing track of it and prioritize important stuff. Great work. (At the same time, that last is what seems to be lacking in follow-through. See below.) One suggestion for an improvement on the gmail interface: Consider introducing a hierarchy syntax in labels. E.g., if I've got a label for "restaurants" I might create a label "restaurants/lunch" that means "first search for anything tagged restaraurants and then narrow by searching for anything also tagged lunch". In any UI that shows a list of the labels, collapse the heirarchy so that I don't have to see both "restaurants" and "restaurants/lunch" at the same time. This creates an interface familiar to users who are accustomed to having folders arranged hierarchically, without changing the search model that ultimately locates the referenced messages. (Is it possible to search for messages based on which source they came from?) Next some nits or minor problems, in no particular order ... The default color scheme is pretty terrible. (I did mention there'd be "nits".) When I widened my terminal window to try to see more of the preview text on the thread screen, sup didn't pick up on the size change. There's either no on-screen help for how one builds up a search expression, or it's simply too hard to find that help, and in particular it wasn't obvious how one searches for all messages having a certain label (I was expecting maybe something like gmail's label:Xyz syntax). It should be possible to create search that matches a label without finding other messages that happen to contain the same word (maybe it is possible and I just haven't figure out how yet). I happened to encounter a case of new mail arriving while I was using sup, wherein a colleague had replied to a message by editing the Subject such that his entire reply was there and the message body was empty. Sup collapsed this into the thread and hid his new subject behind the original subject. I had to bail out and switch over to alpine to figure out why he'd sent a seemingly empty message. OK, now the show stoppers. I have a LOT of IMAP folders (conservatively, hundreds), many of them in a shared hierarchy not under my control; sup's interface would be the perfect way to get a handle on these, but it would take me way too long to add them one by one as separate URL sources. At the moment sup might be described as phenomenal cosmic power in an itty-bitty living space. If you're going to have any hope of becoming the choice of nerds everywhere, you've got address the "play well with others" problem, at the very least with the IMAP INBOX, if not with other mailboxes. Forcing me to exit from sup and do a complete re-index whenever a message disappears is just not going to fly, particularly for a protocol that provides so many tools for keeping in sync. I know, this doesn't fit with the "never delete anything, just stop looking at it" model that sup wants to present, but in the real world even nerds can't store things in their inbox forever, and for it to really be THE email client of choice, I want to keep sup running for weeks at a time and never have a reason to leave the interface (except maybe to escape to a web browser or to drop into my editor when composing mail). By the same token, sup needs to be able to push deletion marks back up to the IMAP server and purge the mailbox. Even if you violate the IMAP usage model by implementing delete as some kind of move-to-trash operation, so that sup can keep indexing the trash, there has to be a way for the user to manage the size of his inbox without switching to some other means of accessing the server. And to really take advantage of sup's ability to search and classify to clean up my messy mail store, I need a way to permanently throw away all the spam and duplicate messages that have accumulated in the odd procmail-created corners of my folder space. It's even fine if the only way to do this is through IMAP or the like; sup does not need to incorporate the mechanics of local mailbox management. That's about it for impressions from a few hours of experimentation. I think sup shows great promise and I've joined the mailing list to keep track of its progress. Congratulations on what you've got so far, and I look forward to seeing more. _______________________________________________ sup-talk mailing list sup-talk@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/sup-talk
