Sup Mail Client is Saving my life

About a month ago I decided to get very geeky and installed a command line emailing program: Sup. I started off by moving my main work account over to test it out and after a month of heavy testing I have now just moved my other accounts across.

So why?

Well, let me first state that Sup is no where near perfect. Crazy people out there still send me HTML email which obviously doesn’t display too well in a command line interface, but I can open those up in my browser. I still haven’t found a way to easily search and add multiple names from the address book to an email I’m composing. And there is that irritating thing that means if I’m writing an email, I can go back and view my inbox (note: this is probably my fault, I’m using a popup window’d emacs).

But the thing is these are all fixable. It is open source, so if these things really pissed me off then I should learn Ruby and have a crack at fixing them myself. And the thing is I like Sup so much I just might.

Also Sup is being actively developed. If you have a look on the Gitorius page you can see that Sup’s maintainer William Morgan seems to spend every weekend hacking away! Plus there is a large list of active developers.

Yet I didn’t move all my mail accounts over to Sup just because I can fix things and if I can’t then hopefully someone else will!

No, I moved them all over because Sup appears to be slowly, email by email, saving my life.

I currently have 1893 emails index, but of these 1893 email, only 12 of them are in my inbox. For me this is unheard of.

Sup has provided me with such an easy system of filing and organising my mail that I can deal with it pretty much instantly, clearing my inbox. And over the last month I have found that keeping a clean inbox keeps my head pretty focused. I’m not worrying about all the emails I have to deal with. I am finding I can handle more stuff, get more stuff done and still have a tidy head.

This is great news!

Having this confidence of being able to handle more stuff, I’m wanting to handle more stuff. I want to do more things, I want to push projects forward. I am now no longer wallowing in an unorganised mess! So thank you William and thank you Sup – you are saving my life

More stuff? Bring it on!

More Sup posts

• Sup, OfflineIMAP, MSMTP on Jaunty
• Fixing a Sup Crash

Simple tools produce powerful results

Sometimes I really love the Linux world. Sometimes it all fits so neatly together and lets you just get stuff done. Sure it might take a bit of digging around, but when it all comes together it really is beautiful!

I’m waxing lyrical today because I have just managed to fit all the pieces together for a certain aspect of a large project we’re working here at ibrow towers. This particular problem was a three parter:

1. Users can FTP into a server into their own directory.
2. These users should be created automatically (i.e. sign up on site, get details, ftp) and have the same login credentials as the rest of the site
3. Uploads to the FTP server should be monitored and each file processed

To solve this three part problem, I utilised the following:

• VSFTPD FTP Server using MySQL as the credentials database
• incron as the directory monitoring
• bash as the glue

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