Re: Link from orgmode file to E-Mail (using kmail or notmuch)

[Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>]

* Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> [2023-01-24 12:41]:
> > This is weird since ever. I've been talking to some collegues and everybody 
> > has his/her own special approach. Mostly producing a PDF from the E-Mail and 
> > saving this and its attachments somewhere. That's a thing that bothered me for 
> > decades. 
> 
> Well. The more widely used standard is Maildir - downloading emails from
> server to local machine. Emails are just files there that can be indexed
> by variety of mail client software.

I have to give some corrections according to my knowledge.

Maildir is less used format, not widely used. Not even in GNU/Linux,
it is simply not default. I guess mbox format is much more used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

And it is not related to how people download or not download
e-mails. And how server uses mail boxes is also independent of how
users use mailboxes.

E-mails are not "just files", they are pieces of informaton and if
they are stored as files depends of software. When e-mail is on
server, it may run different software storing e-mails in the databases
where database objects are not independent files for each e-mail, and
can't be manipulated as such.

And retrieving e-mails, while mostly in form of files, may be also in
form of a database objects. 

There is server side and client side software, they work independent
of each other and decide how to store e-mails. Or not store it at all
at client's computer.

To understand what is widely used e-mail file format, one has to see
what are widely used e-mail clients. 

Maybe this picture may help:
https://d27jswm5an3efw.cloudfront.net/app/uploads/2021/04/most-popular-email-clients-graph.jpeg

or this one:

https://www.oberlo.com/media/1673256706-most-used-email-clients-worldwide.png?fit=max&fm=webp&w=1800

Those are by majority all web software clients.

No matter if statistics are right or wrong, not even Thunderbird is
there, and Thunderbird has Maildir only as experimental option.

And regarding indexing, many e-mail programs do not support indexing,
it is not at all their main purpose. They may retrieve e-mail, read,
reply, sort, delete, but indexing is often forgotten feature.

> The main question is which email clients actually support mid: links.
> notmuch does, but in non-standard way, without doing it system-wide.

notmuch is more indexing system, and programs working with notmuch may
be considered email clients.

Another e-mail indexing program is "mu" and I am sure it can search by
Message-ID: https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/ as notmuch never
worked on my computer. 

I can't verify it as I did not use index, being very efficient without
it due to method of sorting all e-mails per Maildir representing the
e-mail address.

Sadly mid: appear not to be supported by many software, just as many
software not supporting various URLs when they should. 

Let us not forget there are universal URL launchers, such as:

- exo-open from XFce

- xdg-open - opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application
  (Free Desktop

- kde-open from KDE

- rox -U -- may launch any type of URI handlers by user customization:
  https://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/book/export/html/163.html

And there are others, including browsers being mainly used to launch
any types of URI schemes.

Maybe you can see the pattern that there various launchers for URI
schemes and all of them allow users to specify which software to use,
and there are many browsers, majority of browsers follow the pattern
to allow users to specify how to open which URI scheme.

By seeing the pattern, you may see why is it useful. I hope so.

And then I hope you will not keep URI handlers hard coded, but allow
Org users to decide which launcher, browser, or what to use on Org
hyperlinks.

When I think of "mid:" I think of "Message-ID: " and that is generally
not hard to find in various e-mail formats.

In Emacs, for mbox files, it would be something as:
(search-forward "87y2e2bgzh.fsf@example.com") followed by extracting
and displaying of the found e-mail.

With Maildirs it would be `grep' search on Maildir folder, it is
almost instant on hundreds of e-mails.

Of course scalability is a problem when using `grep' as with too many
e-mails, it would last long.

That is why both for mh, mbox, Maildir and other folders, one shall
always specify the folder location.

Without folder location mid:123 alone would require indexer to find
the Message-ID.

That is why it would not be for Org to specify how mid links are
opened but for user to customize it.

As user may have mid:// format or only mid: or maybe
mid://file/message-id format, depending of the software.

That Thunderbird uses only mid:message-id format is definitely unique
and not ordinary as generally e-mail clients do not support it.

Additionally, mid: need not specify only local file, it could specify
IMAP as well mid:imaps://example.com/INBOX&message-id

-- 
Jean

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