On 05/09/2013 12:28 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
The real power here would be for someone who is reading the archives to "jump into" a discussion, potentially long after the fact. Imagine you've done a web search for a particular problem you're having and it lands you on a page in an archive. You want to follow up to that message with some additional information or question. Reducing the burden for that type of intermittent involvement in a topic should be the goal.
A simple step toward this goal would be to add a mailto link on the message's archive page that includes an In-Reply-To field, as outlined in the "Basic Examples" section of the Mailto RFC:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6068#section-6.1
so something like:
<a href="mailto:list@example.org?In-Reply-To=%3C3469A91.D10AF4C@example.com%3E">Reply to this message</a>
While this doesn't solve the problem for everyone (i'm sure there are MUAs that don't accept this header when generating mail from a mailto: link), it should be very easy to implement, and if mailman's default archives were to include such a link it would spur people to fix non-compliant MUAs.
Regards,
--dkg