mhonarc-users

e-mail address to mailto links (why it is not done)

1997-05-28 10:15:15
I've been having a look at the text filters, and I've had some requests that
"normal" e-mail addresses within messages (not prefixed by a mailto:) be
made into clickable mailto: links in the archives.  Whilst I'll probably put
in a little hack to do it, I thought it might be a nice option for you to
include in your release versions.

This has been requested before, but has not been added since there
would be a conflict between hyperlinking message-ids and e-mail
addresses.  In message headers, conversion is controled because
mhonarc can key off the various fields of the headers.  The body
has no such structure.

According to RFC 822, there is no syntactical way to distinguish a
message-id from an e-mail address (they are syntactically the same).

You may ask why mhonarc bothers to check for message-ids in 
bodies.  It is fairly common (especially in news postings) to
include the referenced message-ids in the body.  For example:

    In your message <a6758ghd74(_dot_)8123456(_at_)foo(_dot_)org>, you write:
    ...

The other thing is I can create manual references to messages
I know exist in an archive.  For example, I may refer the
reader of the message to another message that is relevant to
the discussion, like:

    "See <199705062138(_dot_)OAA21179(_at_)hyfrydol(_dot_)reid(_dot_)org> for 
the
     start of the message conflict discussion..."

If the message-id exists in the archive, the id will be linked
to the message.

The gain of converted e-mail addresses in bodies seems very
minute, so I have not bothered with it.  Since the header
contains hyperlinked e-mail addresses, it usually covers the
important addresses of the message.

Fill free to experiment, however.  If you come up with
something that works for you, please contribute it to this
list.

        --ewh

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