Ubuntu Jaunty command line email: Sup, OfflineIMAP and MSMTP

Recently I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with both Thunderbird. Don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent email solution, but lately I’ve been finding that it is slowing down due to the amount of emails I have. I do have a webmail package attached to it, which I use of Thunderbird has slowed to a grinding halt, but sometimes, and as hard as this may be to believe, I’m not connected to the internets!

Also, using Thunderbird is just not geeky enough.

So I was looking for something better, something quicker that allowed me to download emails, but keep in sync my IMAP. And don’t forget, something truly dweeby. For me, this meant the command line. I find the more I use Linux the more I am drifting towards the command line as a way of getting things done.

After a bit of searching around, I found a Rails package called Sup. This looked like the ideal solution from my point of view. The authors seemed to be coming from the same head space I am regarding email, so I thought I’d give it a try.

After several hours hacking about, I now have it fully working, and even sending email, and I’ll outline the steps I took to get it up and running. I’m running Xubuntu Jaunty, but hopefully this will apply to most Ubuntu and Debian versions.

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