Hacker News Reader

Email hashes are not very useful as additional headers are added to the email every step on the way. Even if you send an email to yourself, the copy in the Sent Mail folder has a different hash than the one in Inbox.

View on HN

They are useful for verification though that an email is the original, and for detecting changed messages when syncing.

DKIM offers something similar.

At least for the verifying that an email is original I agree with the other poster, DKIM exists for that purpose, to sign emails while in transit.

As for changed messages while synching, do your messages change after delivery? If not, a simple delivered after X would be sufficient.

Yes messages can change after syncing. Using mbsync for example, if you change the contents of an email locally, there are no ways to detect the change. I guess the preferred solution may be to do a more generic sync directly from the mail server and bypass IMAP entirely.. not possible with most email providers like Gmail, Microsoft, etc. Hopeful to setup my own email server someday.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com