A change of email client
August 27 2009, 9:28 AM
Some time ago I changed from a GUI email client to mutt,
http://www.mutt.org/ and have been liking the extra configuration
options and the keyboard based control over the system but it was still
lacking in some way that I could not quite put my finger on. This week I
have decided to give sup a go. http://sup.rubyforge.org/ It is another
text based email client but one with quite a different approach from
others. In essence it is much more like gmail with the concepts of
thread, labels and search being it main pinning points. I have added all my personal and work mail to the system now and it is
working well. I really like the threading approach with it's display of
a thread of messages as a conversation. Allowing you to archive that
thread out the way but if somebody replies to it later bringing it back
to your inbox. The search is pretty good and I would say simpler and faster than
integrating mairix into mutt which I was using before. I have long been
a fan of keeping all your mail in one folder and searching for things
when you need it and with the addition of some labels now this is a lot
better. I think that it is more efficient to spend a short time
searching for email when you need it rather than sorting every email as
it comes in. One thing that it has improved is the integration of mailing lists. I
now have some coming up in my inbox which I never used and so
conversations are not passing me by so much. Sup does have one downside. It creates a metadata store for things like
the labels and archive status which is local to the computer it is
running on. It also will not notice changes to your mailbox that happen
elsewhere only new messages. This means that once you start using it for
your email then it is the only way to use it. I have decided to ignore
that for now as I have found that mostly I am only using this laptop for
mail. There is a pretty good dump facility and so if I do have problems
or need to move to another PC then I can do the restore and also some
manual sync options to make it do a full check if you have been using
webmail for moving stuff about. Perhaps in the future they will look at
some synchronisation.
http://www.mutt.org/ and have been liking the extra configuration
options and the keyboard based control over the system but it was still
lacking in some way that I could not quite put my finger on. This week I
have decided to give sup a go. http://sup.rubyforge.org/ It is another
text based email client but one with quite a different approach from
others. In essence it is much more like gmail with the concepts of
thread, labels and search being it main pinning points. I have added all my personal and work mail to the system now and it is
working well. I really like the threading approach with it's display of
a thread of messages as a conversation. Allowing you to archive that
thread out the way but if somebody replies to it later bringing it back
to your inbox. The search is pretty good and I would say simpler and faster than
integrating mairix into mutt which I was using before. I have long been
a fan of keeping all your mail in one folder and searching for things
when you need it and with the addition of some labels now this is a lot
better. I think that it is more efficient to spend a short time
searching for email when you need it rather than sorting every email as
it comes in. One thing that it has improved is the integration of mailing lists. I
now have some coming up in my inbox which I never used and so
conversations are not passing me by so much. Sup does have one downside. It creates a metadata store for things like
the labels and archive status which is local to the computer it is
running on. It also will not notice changes to your mailbox that happen
elsewhere only new messages. This means that once you start using it for
your email then it is the only way to use it. I have decided to ignore
that for now as I have found that mostly I am only using this laptop for
mail. There is a pretty good dump facility and so if I do have problems
or need to move to another PC then I can do the restore and also some
manual sync options to make it do a full check if you have been using
webmail for moving stuff about. Perhaps in the future they will look at
some synchronisation.