As many of you know, I use Sup for my emailing needs, and I think it is pretty great. But today, disaster (or at least I initially thought so)!
Instead of opening up and downloading as normal it instead told me it was locked by another process. This in itself is not unusual, sometimes I close the terminal window it is running in by mistake, or shutdown without first closing sup. Hoever, what was different was that the user, host and PID were all blank. When I confirmed it should kill the old process it, well, crashed.
Error: the index is locked by another process! User '' on
host '' is running with pid .
The process was alive as of at least 14 seconds ago.
Should I ask that process to kill itself (y/n)? y
Ok, trying to kill process...
Terminated
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
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.
