At 19:38 2004/02/23 -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
mail reader is much more likely to be able to make effective use of an
IMAP URL than an HTTP URL. And it's more likely to do a good job
handling a message/rfc822 resource than with a text message encoded as
text/html. There's something perverse in asking a mail reader to fire
up a web browser to read an email message. And for some strange reason
I think that extensions to the email format that exist for the purpose
of reading mail should be usable by mail readers.
It seems to me that the problem we're dancing around is that, as Keith said
earlier, there is little reason to access the same message in an archive
that one already has since the Archived-At field was gotten from it. On the
other hand, message/rfc822 doesn't have a good mechanism for linking the
the "context" of the message in an archive. References coule be used in
concert with List-Archive to access its precursor messages, but finding its
successors and reconstructing the thread tree would require a huge amount
of effort.
I guess that the data object that we are missing here is the Archive itself
with some sort of standardized access protocol. Then the Archived-At field
becomes some sort of <msgarch://host.name/archive.name?msg-id>.
--
Bill McQuillan <McQuilWP(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>