Persistent E-mail Identification is Viable!

Persistent identification of entities in Personal Information Management (PIM) is necessary to enable stable, long-term references in archives and semantic applications. In the case of e-mails, the standard offers Message-IDs (MID), which are widely deployed. However, stores do not use the MID but rather rely on a path, which is likely to change, to refer to e-mails and thus do not offer a stable identification. We show that MIDs are viable to identify and retrieve e-mails from an IMAP store in real-world scenarios. The presented concept can be integrated into any store, but we also offer a software solution that serves as an additional layer above the store and allows real-time access over MID. We propose a validation method to prove that the concept is working and some applications that are enabled by e-mail identification are sketched.