I'm currently touching the plan 9 email tools a lot, and recently rewrote the acme mail client. There are warts, of course, but the ones you've discussing are either related to the underlying communication and not the format, or are easy to deal with.
I'm not sure why you say emails are hard to search. Extract the text and put it into an engine like lucene. There are the usual small corpus problems, but these aren't dependent on format.
As threads are fundamentally a graph, so complaining that the structure matches the structure of the data is... Odd.. to me.
Including the time zone in the date is a small wart. Add an extra specifier to the format string and move on. Base64 is similar: a bit annoying, but decode and move on. And use RFC1652.
I'm not sure why you say emails are hard to search. Extract the text and put it into an engine like lucene. There are the usual small corpus problems, but these aren't dependent on format.
As threads are fundamentally a graph, so complaining that the structure matches the structure of the data is... Odd.. to me.
Including the time zone in the date is a small wart. Add an extra specifier to the format string and move on. Base64 is similar: a bit annoying, but decode and move on. And use RFC1652.