Thinking about this earlier this morning as I swim through my inbox. I feel like it'd be easier to track down an email if there was a unique ID attached in the subject line. Had a co-worker ask me: "did you see that email so and so sent the other day?"<p>Of course I did, but I also have 10-15 emails from that same person on that same day. I feel like it'd be easier to track down if someone asked "Did you see email E2YKW3 that Michelle sent the other day asking for follow up?"<p>Perhaps a shower thought, but wanted to get the community's take on this.
How would you remember a random string if you cannot remember a subject line (or even body text) worded by a human? All email clients allow you to search the subject, body, presence/absence of attachments, from, to, etc. Message-ID, References, In-Reply-To...there are already several headers created and managed (though in a hidden way) by email clients. But the values of these headers are usually long strings that humans cannot easily remember.<p>Open up an emails from different email threads (preferably one that has been sent later in the reply chain) and see the raw headers. There's a lot of information there. Something in it could be useful to you or for you to devise something better than the status quo.
I use email all the time and have never even remotely encountered a point where I would need something like this. Why wouldn't you simply refer to a subject line? And why would someone say "Did you see email E2YKW3" I can't imagine a single person saying that frankly.
This is what the subject line is for. If you don’t read the existing subject line they write, which distinguishes the various messages from a single person, and gives some indication of the topic, why would you remember some random string of characters that is otherwise meaningless?
That's an interesting thought. I'm working on a desktop IMAP client in my spare time so my burgeoning IMAP knowledge is...getting there.<p>Would this ID be prominent? Appear on hover?