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.
Why not call it a 'message path', because the concept of a filesystem path (*)
is familiar to users and for maildir and mh it's actually a filesystem path,
(relative to the mailbox root). Then just note the exceptions that for imap
and pop3, the path is simulated and not an actual filesystem path but behaves
in an equivalent way.
(*) including the fact that it might change, that there might be more than one
path referencing the same thing, etc, etc.
