Feature request: getting a message-id link from email + CLI option to open email via message-id
Hi,
I'm in the process of migrating from Thunderbird to Evolution for many reasons. One feature I had in Outlook (via VBA) and Thunderbird (via thunderlink and later cb_thunderlink) was the ability to extract a link to an email for being processed and stored in external tools. Furthermore, I would like to be able to open up a specific email via this link.
The usual standard for referring to emails is via Message-ID header. Therefore, I personally configured my tool such that I got a link like:
[[messageid:<THEMESSAGEID>][<ISO-TIME> <SENDERNAME> <SENDEREMAIL>: <SUBJECT>]]
Using this link in my external tool of choice (which one doesn't really matter as long as it can deal with links) provides me an easy to manage integration between email and my knowledge management.
If I would use Markdown, I would settle for following link format:
[messageid:<THEMESSAGEID>(<ISO-TIME> <SENDERNAME> <SENDEREMAIL>: <SUBJECT>)
For HTML:
<a href="messageid:<THEMESSAGEID>"><ISO-TIME> <SENDERNAME> <SENDEREMAIL>: <SUBJECT></a>
You get the idea.
Of course, the external tool has to provide ways of translating those messageid-links into a command line call that opens up the email. For example something like /usr/bin/evolution --open "messageid=foo@example.com"
Therefore, what it would take for Evolution to integrate in this universal method is:
- Ability to let external tool open up a specific email (or any uniquely identifiable object?) via a command line option for the already running (or not) Evolution.
- Ability to insert a string to the system clipboard in a user-defined format (3 examples above) at least when a keyboard shortcut is invoked, maybe also via icon or similar UI element.
So far with my Evolution (3.36.4-0ubuntu1) I could not find anything that would provide this workflow with Evolution. Since this is one of my most used features for (any) email client, this doesn't let me switch to Evolution yet. Very unfortunate because I do think that Evolution is far superior and trustworthy compared to Thunderbird.