[[
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(a)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&…
]]