I think it's sadly a bit of a chicken and egg problem, unless someone sets out to write support for servers (mostly dovecot I assume) and clients (web and desktop).
It would be worthwhile for many reasons not just the immutable IDs. I'd certainly donate to someone showing initiative working on this.
Emails should really be identified by Message-Id (which isn't guaranteed unique, but is very selective) and a hash of the body and a subset of the headers (e.g., excluding Received headers, and maybe using only Message-Id, Date, and From, maybe not even Subject).
A good email store is very searchable, and a good MUA searches email, and a good MAP gives the client temporary (ephemeral) handles for "open" emails.
I think it's sadly a bit of a chicken and egg problem, unless someone sets out to write support for servers (mostly dovecot I assume) and clients (web and desktop).
It would be worthwhile for many reasons not just the immutable IDs. I'd certainly donate to someone showing initiative working on this.
Emails should really be identified by Message-Id (which isn't guaranteed unique, but is very selective) and a hash of the body and a subset of the headers (e.g., excluding Received headers, and maybe using only Message-Id, Date, and From, maybe not even Subject).
A good email store is very searchable, and a good MUA searches email, and a good MAP gives the client temporary (ephemeral) handles for "open" emails.