Where Should I Store Private Notes?
I have a class of texts that I am not ready to publish yet, and may never publish at all. These are private notes.
I need to figure out where to put them.
To do that, I need to understand the storage requirements and how the notes will be used.
Obviously, I want to preserve them without losing them and keep them from leaking. I also want to search through them sometimes. I may need to link one note to another, but that is not strictly necessary. I can use the howm approach, where links between notes work through full-text search and the "<<<" and ">>>" syntax.
If I come to the conclusion that everything is email, then it makes sense to save them as messages. The email infrastructure can handle storage. I will have to make backups myself, but that is my responsibility in any case.
Some form of search is available through email clients, which keep all or some messages decrypted. But it is not semantic search, and it is not search for agents.
Overall, that should be enough.
The only problem is that a message has a recipient. I need to decide who that should be. I can either use a nonexistent recipient, with the risk that the recipient may appear one day, or use myself. In the latter case, the messages will be duplicated, but I do not have to send them. I can simply save them in Drafts and later move them to Archive. If I leave the recipient blank, Thunderbird will not encrypt the message in Drafts, obviously because it will not know who the recipient is.
The idea of using email for everything turns out to be unexpectedly powerful.