[Dovecot] Persistence of UIDs

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Jean-Daniel Beaubien <jd.beaubien at gmail.com>:

> I have a question concerning UIDs. How persistant are they?

[snip]

> So to come back to my question, can I store the UIDs and reuse those UIDs
> later on to obtain the body of the email??? Or can the UIDs change on the
> server and they will not be valid anymore?.

You really need to read RFC 3501 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3501),  
specifically section 2.3.1.1.

Short answer: UIDs will almost always be persistent, but you always  
need to check UIDVALIDITY in the tiny chance that they may be  
invalidated.

michael