Re: [Nmh-workers] A useless but interesting exercise: Design MH from scratch in the 2014 context

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Feb 19, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Paul Vixie <address@hidden> wrote:

> third and finally, i'd fully support the IMAP "UID" psychosis, by offering 
> persistent-for-the-life-of-the-message numeric identifiers, 

For-the-life-of-the-message where?  Within a folder?  Within ~/Mail?

If you want a truly unique identifier for a message, use a cryptographic hash 
of the message file.  (The original message, before MH starts mucking it up 
with things like annotations.)  This even works with Norm's hypothetical 
distributed data model.

This is one of the reasons why I would stick with the 'one message per file' 
paradigm, rather than the 'message per directory' scheme you outlined.  It's 
also one of the benefits of UTF-8 everywhere.  Remove all the MIME encodings 
and convert to a common character set and you have a single common 
representation of the message that's independent of the originator's 
composition environment and the intervening message transports.

--lyndon

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