Quite some time ago now, I tried sup but found it’s indexing latencies unacceptable for my workflow. I also found the user interface a bit foreign and hard to get into.

More recently I’ve found notmuch, a project that started as a C rewrite of the core bits of sup. Basically, it’s a program that indexes and searches through your existing mail.

I had two issues with it.

• it had an emacs interface, and
• it uses maildir instead of mailbox.

I recently added an outgoing mail filter to capture the email addresses of people I write email to. This saves me time on adding them to my address book manually.

I ran into Mark’s Mutt Fan and Tip page and was pleased by the description of lbdb. I then found a way to write an outgoing filter to capture email addresses as I send mail… I wasn’t really interested in lbdb holding the forged SPAM addresses.