

Ask HN: Why no URIs for email? - chewxy

Hey HN,<p>I&#x27;ve been curious about this question for sometime, but why wasn&#x27;t email standardized to have a URI for each individual message?<p>I&#x27;ve read RFC5322, but there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any discussion devoted to why there isn&#x27;t any URI specified for an email message.<p>Granted, each individual mail server (and indeed, even email clients) could assign their resource address differently, but wouldn&#x27;t it be nice if a email message is addressable by an address?<p>Or am I missing something entirely
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_delirium
It does, unless I misunderstand what you mean.

The original URL RFC, RFC 1738
([http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738)),
envisioned three URI schemes relating to email. The mid: scheme would refer to
messages by message-id, the cid: scheme to parts of a MIME-encoded message by
content-id, and the mailserver: scheme would refer to resources on a
mailserver.

The mid/cid schemes were further specified in RFC 2111
([http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2111](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2111)) a
1997 proposed standard, updated in 1998
([http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2392](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2392)).
These do what you want, I think: mid:message-id is a URI referring to an
individual message.

The mailserver: scheme was never further defined, and was formally moved to
the history books in 2011
([http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6196](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6196)).

~~~
chewxy
Oh thank you. Didn't know it was in another different standard.

