What I would ask is: is there a way I can solve this problem without having to totally rearrange how I use email? I'm curious whether the author looked at, say, running a personal MDA that served mail over IMAP, so that it could be interacted with via a desktop email client, without requiring that client to serve as the point of truth. Not to say that corruption couldn't still happen that way, but Thunderbird (for example) can be configured to store only a subset of messages locally, or none at all. With a reasonably fast connection to the MDA, this seems like a possibly workable solution.