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

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Sun, 2018-12-23 at 23:29 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > 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.

        Hi,
as far as I know, for example Google server uses Message-ID as an
overall unique message identifier. Once you've stored one message of
that Message-ID, it doesn't store another one with it. It has some
consequences with sent messages and mailing lists, but that's another
story.

> 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.

While I agree with you that there is no standard for the servers, the
client might be able to follow RFC 2392. Evolution has a feature
request filled:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788192
and it can use the local cache for the lookup of the message (this
local cache is used for the message list in the GUI). The Message-ID
header content is indexed as its MD5 checksum (similar to In-Reply-To
and References headers content).
        Bye,
        Milan