At 04:41 04/10/28, Bruce Lilly wrote:
>On Wed October 27 2004 13:48, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
>> When I do, that field is useful. So... is it highly unusual to want to
>> link to a message in a mail archive?
>
>Perhaps not, but if one is already looking at the archive, one
>can simply copy and paste the URI of the message in that archive
>rather than grubbing through the message content itself for the
>field, stripping brackets, etc.
Yes, of course.
>And if one has the entire message
>available (as is necessarily the case with Archived-At), it is just
>as easy to forward the message or quote relevant parts of it.
Quoting sometimes helps, but is really a separate issue; the record
of where something was said is often as important as what was said,
and pointing to something can reduce the problem of quoting out of
context. As for forwarding, that may work with a single message,
but doesn't work e.g. for minutes of a meeting with dozens of
pointers to other messages. It also does not work if one wants
to link from a Web page to a message.
>Or it can be referenced by message-id.
Referencing by message-id requires that either your correspondent(s)
have received that message, and have an easy way to access it in
their MUA (some MUAs may allow that, and more should allow it,
but I don't know that many actually do), or have a way to find
an arbitrary message archived somewhere on the Internet by messageid.
To implement the former is relatively easy, for the later, Google
may help, but it's not being updated fast enough.
Regards, Martin.