On Thu, Oct 15, 2026 at 03:42:00PM -0400, Kurt Hackenberg wrote:
On Thu, Oct 15, 2026 at 11:42 +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:Add the concept of a "message identifier" - naming ideas welcome. It know this is a little too close to message-id and could be confusing. For Maildir/mh it's the path inside the mailbox. For IMAP it's the UID. For POP3 it's the refno. mbox doesn't currently implement anything.Sounds reasonable, but here's an idea about a better name.That doesn't identify a message; it identifies a storage location of a message. (There could be many stored copies of a message.) Maybe it could be called storage location, or storage identifier. It should not be called a message identifier.
Thank you Kurt. That sounds much better.
To be complete, it should include an identifier of the folder, along with the identifier within that folder. (For example, the folder ID would be needed for the recent request about a notmuch search.) The folder identifier would be a pathname for a local folder, but something else for an IMAP or POP folder -- a URL, I guess.
It's easy enough to include the folder. But that would always be the same value: the currently open folder.For the notmuch search case, the individual messages are symlinked, and mutt doesn't look at the target of the symlink. So the result would just be:
=.cache cur/<maildir-filename>for every message. I don't currently have any intention of adding additional code to dereference those symlinks.
A message doesn't always have a storage location, because it's not always stored. It's not in any storage when it's sent across the network through SMTP. Also, it's possible to send a message through a Unix pipe, or even send a whole folder, if the folder is a single sequential file like mbox. (There's a program named mboxgrep that does that kind of thing.)Either or both of the folder identifier and identifier within that folder, could be missing.
Thanks! I'll think about it a bit more before I take any direction with this, and will post later on. -- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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