Re: [Evolution] Create link to a specific mail in Evolution

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Sun, 2018-12-23 at 22:40 +0100, Jan Claeys wrote:
> On Sun, 2018-12-23 at 17:59 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Sun, 2018-12-23 at 17:50 +0100, Bjoern Schiessle wrote:
> > > it happens regularly that I want to refer to a email in my notes, a
> > > text document, etc. Is there a way to generate a "link" to a mail
> > > in Evolution which I could copy over to my notes, which again opens
> > > Evolution and jumps directly to the mail on click?
> >
> > Not from within Evolution.
> >
> > > If this doesn't exists out of the box, I would be also happy for
> > > suggestions how I might be able to solve this with some scripting
> > > involved.
> >
> > Off the top of my head, I think this would be pretty hard to do. You
> > would have to accommodate all the different storage locations a
> > message could be in, both local and remote, and take account of it
> > possibly being moved around. There is no universal way to do this.
>
> I suppose the “universal” way to link to messages is using a mid: URL
> that refers to the Message-ID in a message's header.
> See: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2392

The Message-ID is mainly useful in debugging because it can be used to
trace the flow of a message across mail servers. Although the
definition describes it as a universal message *locator*, it's really
more like a URI than a URL. To make it work as a link there would need
to be a standard way to follow it to the message itself, which would
ideally work on IMAP, POP, Exchange etc., but that doesn't exist at
present.

> Evolution currently doesn't support this, but I guess it would be
> possible to add it if someone is motivated enough…
>
> Soem thoughts:
>  * I'm not sure if Evolution keeps an index of Message-IDs; if not it
>    could take a rather long time to find the right message in a large
>    mailbox (or multiple large ones).
>  * Maybe some IMAP servers index & allow searching for it?

Again, this (if it even exists) would be mailstore-specific, not a
universal solution.

Within these limitations it could possibly be used for what the OP
wants. However I think the limitations are such as to make it probably
not worth investing a lot of time on. But feel free to try :-)

poc