[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/mailman-msgid?showcomments=yes As someone who is interested in and cites email conversations, the opacity of the mailman interface -- or the lack of my understanding -- is a pain. I was spoiled by the W3C's system [1] where each email had a header with a URL to its place in the archive, which corresponded in some way to the msg-id! When processing comments on a spec, or citing conversations, its very handy to be able to link to a persistent Web representation of an email.

In writing about Wikipedia discourse I'm stuck with using the message-id if I happen to have that email in a mbox, or a URL if I happen to have a Web page, but from one I can not easily get the other, and I'm not confident that the URL will be stable in any case. (For example, will [2] always correspond to the message with the message-id "42BEC0EF.6070906@web.de"?)

Without a guarantee of stability, I suppose its best to use msg-id in citing WP discourse, but that makes finding that message problematic for the reader. I'd provide a hint if I could somehow obtain it myself, but the HTML page for a message in the archive has no indicatation of the msg-id. And even if I have the msg-id, I can't easily find the corresponding archive URL. Before sending this message, I thought there would be a search interface and I could write a script, but there doesn't appear to be one, and it doesn't work in Google (e.g., [3]).

What to do??

[1] http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Devel [2] http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-June/040600.html [3] http://www.google.com/search?as_q=42BEC0EF.6070906%40web.de&num=10&h... ]]