Utility? That's easy! The system described by Martin's draft is extremely
useful. It is implemented by the w3.org mailing list systems, and in my
work using those mailing lists I've made frequent and much-appreciated use
of the feature.
Maybe you could provide some concrete examples?
I find it faintly ironic that one of the best (as in most usable and most
useful) mailing list services I've used anywhere on the Internet is run by
the World Wide *Web* Consortium. The archive system is a major factor in
that usability. Mail archives really take on additional value when they
become a fully linked and cross-linked part of the Web. For this to really
work well --as it does-- the messages really need to be served using a
hypertext format, such as HTML. I've no objection if others would like to
design and build systems that serve messages using whatever format they
like, but to claim that the HTML-served messages are in some sense not
useful or non-functional is to ignore the daily experience of the many
people who use them.
I guess the question is this - do you want the archived email messages to
be usable as email messages, or do you want them to be a part of the web?
It's very difficult to do both, because web browsers tend not to support
message/rfc822 very well.
I'm not surprised if W3C is good at making email messages a part of the
web. But it also shouldn't be surprising if people who care about email
want archived email messages to have the functionality we've come to
expect from email messages.
Keith