Re:Email is your electronic memory
by brongondwana on Thursday February 15, 2018 @05:01AM
(#16382906)
You're not the first person to think of using git-like storage for email, and you won't be the last!
Sadly deduplication isn't quite that easy - while the binary formats might be the same, MIME is very un-roundtrip-friendly when you start from the MIME structure. There are many ways to encode the same bytes, so if you need to reconstruct the raw bytes (FETCH RFC822) then you need a way to recover those original bytes. I've started work on that a few times, but it's never been worth the effort to make it stable.
Sadly deduplication isn't quite that easy - while the binary formats might be the same, MIME is very un-roundtrip-friendly when you start from the MIME structure. There are many ways to encode the same bytes, so if you need to reconstruct the raw bytes (FETCH RFC822) then you need a way to recover those original bytes. I've started work on that a few times, but it's never been worth the effort to make it stable.