The ultimate e-mail setup: Gmail + SUP (??)

I read through Planet Debian -- which aggregates the blogs of Debian developers -- on a regular basis, and today I found something very intriguing. Not satisfied with any of the traditional Linux/Windows/Mac e-mail tools, David Moreno Garza began using Gmail -- not exactly the go-to geek solution. He eventually added an app called SUP to handle the mail on his own machine. He explains it better then I can:

Then I found Sup, which I think is like GMail but on mutt. It is written in Ruby and distributed as a gem (I’d prefer it to be in C/C++, but I’ll always give the benefit of doubt). Its main feature? A console mail client featuring GMail’s features, such as, one inbox, one big archive and labels all over the place, which is exactly what I was (probably) looking for. As the time of writing,Sup can only connect to IMAPs remote servers or read a number of local file formats. So, I undusted fetchmail and set it up. Since all my mail accounts now are forwarded to the main GMail account, I only need to handle one fetchmail config to get messages with POP (and some procmail recipes salting touch).

Here comes the sweetest thing from all this setup, by enabling GMail’s POP support, you can also specify if you want it to delete the GMail copy or store it. Since I’ve used 2% of all my storage, the best thing to do right now is to store and archive, which means that while i download all my email everyday and several times a day, all downloaded copies are also being stored on GMail, so in case I don’t have access to my machine, I can still find messages on the web interface. GMail also works nicely when you are sending an email from your remote mail client and using GMail’s SMTP, then also the mail you are sending gets stored on your GMail web interface, which is totally cool.

So I think I’m mildly content now with what I have. This also leads me to another awesome feature for me: Spam gets processed by GMail before I fetch it, so most of my downloaded POP mail is ham. In case I want to see some spam, the web interface will have it as usual for 30 days before being deleted.

I don't use Gmail, although I do use Google Docs. But having the flexibility of online Gmail with more powerful mail handling on my desktop sounds like a great thing, indeed.

I'm not ready to try this yet, but if you are, have at it.