Fri 23 Sep 2005
Before I go to lunch I thought I would just post a random feature I would like to see in mail clients when dealing with mailing lists. Most of my mail comes from mailing lists. Occasionally I want to reference a mailing list on another list, in private e-mail or in my blog. It would be really cool if I could drag and drop or somehow get the archive reference to that particular e-mail into another document.
Mailing lists already add the header List-Archive: which tells you where to look for the archives. It should be trivial (UPDATE: Apparently it is not) to add a header field which also gives you the full URL to the particular mail say List-Reference-URL:. I didn’t see a field in the headers to do this though there may be a standard already in place since I am sure I am not the only person to have thought of this.
The other part of the equation is having mail software like Evolution give an easy to use way to export this information.
It is a wonder with FOSS being such a dominate platform on the Internet why we don’t integrate these little niceties here and there. Mailing lists might not be the best example as its usefulness extends mostly to just techies but I am sure there are other cases to be made where FOSS software can take advantage of each other to make the user experience that much more productive even if it is just a small step at a time.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:49 pm
|Jef| was mentioned this a week or so before. Pretty nice feature to have
September 23rd, 2005 at 2:04 pm
My killer feature would be the ability to subscribe to a mailing list via its archive. Perhaps only via gzipped mboxes over http if thats available, but ideally my mailer would be able to parse common html archive formats. There are a lot of lists I want to read but never post and this would make lots-o-sense. Now camel has moved into e-d-s perhaps I’ll have another hack at it.
September 23rd, 2005 at 6:46 pm
thunderbird has a nice way of exposing this info via an extension called “Display Mailing List Header” or some such. screenshotted for you here:
http://atropine.ath.cx/~emily/images/list_header.png
it does seem like RFC 2369 leaves things open to be extended… like a List-Post-URL header ? i can’t understand what would be so hard about it at all.
maybe the first step is just submitting a patch to the mailing list software implementing this little header ?
September 24th, 2005 at 12:41 am
It should be reasonably easy to add the link; the link just needs to be to a server script rather than directly to a message URL. I agree that it’s difficult to know, at mail-send-from-mailserver time, what the archive URL of the message will be, but there’s no reason that it can’t be linked to http://example.org/listname/12345.wibble@example.org where 12345.wibble@example.org is the msgid of the message; that URL is a CGI which looks up the msgid in the correspondence list (msgid->URL) and redirects the user to the actual URL of the message. Pipermail, or whatever indexing tool is used, just needs to build the correspondence list when it adds messages to the archive.
September 24th, 2005 at 3:27 am
My pet feature request:
Some way to delete attachments from an email, but not the email itself.
Being one who likes to archive all my email, that way when a casual friend emails an update about themselves with a bunch of pictures, I can save the pics to my images archive folder, and keep the email without bloating my email folder. Same for work emails with big attachments, etc.
September 24th, 2005 at 11:26 pm
Chris: PINE does have that feature, you can delete an attachment and it will not be saved when you save the message to a folder. Request it on your favorite mail reader.
As for original feature request, like suggested already, I believe it’s rather easy to implement: Apparently every message has an almost-unique Message-ID: something like: , all you need is for the mailing list software to provide a CGI that when appended this unique id, redirects to the actual archived message, and for it to add a header to the mail containing that URL. Maybe you should file a feature request with mailman first.
September 25th, 2005 at 7:27 pm
It’s a bit off, but I just use http://gmane.org for all my mailing lists these days. And there, you get a header like
Archived-At:
Signing up a new list is very easy in case you are missing one.
September 25th, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Trying again: the header is something like
Archived-At: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.devel/12081