Hello to all,

I have just heard about Not Much today in some random Linux-related news
site (LWN?), my name is Adrian Perez and I work as systems administrator
(although I can do some code as well :P). I have always thought that the
ideas behind Sup were great, but after some time using it, I got tired of
the oddities that it has. I also do not like doing things like having to
install Ruby just for reading and sorting mails. Some time ago I thought
about doing something like Not Much and in fact I played a bit with the
Python+Xapian and the Python+Whoosh combinations, because I find relaxing
to code things in Python when I am not working and also it is installed
by default on most distribution. I got to have some mailboxes indexed and
basic searching working a couple of months ago. Lately I have been very
busy and had no time for coding, and them... boom! Not Much appears -- and
it is almost exactly what I was trying to do, but faster. I have been
playing a bit with Not Much today, and I think it has potential.

Also, I would like to share one idea I had in mind, that you might find
interesting: One thing I have found very annoying is having to re-tag my
mail when the indexes get b0rked (it happened a couple of times to me while
using Sup), so I was planning to mails as read/unread and adding the tags
not just to the index, but to the mail text itself, e.g. by adding a
"X-Tags" header field or by reusing the "Keywords" one. This way, the index
could be totally recreated by re-reading the mail directories, and this
would also allow to a tools like OfflineIMAP [1] to get the mails into a
local maildir, tagging and indexing the mails with the e-mail reader and
then syncing back the messages with the "X-Tags" header to the IMAP server.
This would allow to use the mail reader from a different computer and still
have everything tagged finely.

Best regards,


---
[1] http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/offlineimap

-- 
Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com>
Igalia - Free Software Engineering