[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Jeff Breidenbach]

>Maybe a way to think about this is that the canonical url is based on
>the message-id, but then there's some way to distill even this down
>to a tinyurl or simple integer that would be stable in the face of
>full archive regenerations.

I'd suggest the reverse. Keep the canoncical archive URL short and
sweet, and then use a URL redirection service to map message-id's
to those URLs. It is the archiver's job to make it all work. For example,
the canonical  archive URL might stay exactly the way it is in pipermail.
But the archival link embedded in the message would instead go
to a redirection service.

http://mail.codeit.com/pipermail/zcommerce/2002-February/000523.html
http://mail.codeit.com/msgid?002701c4eb3d$07170ca0$3142003e@ADSL

The one other thing I'd ike to revisit is integration with third party
archival services. There are two obvious integration points; one is a
button in the Mailman list admin user interface that says "archive with
service X" not unlike the setting in Firefox that basically says "search
with service X". The other integration point is the archival link
discussed above. In which case it would be set to something like.

http://third-party-service/msgid?002701c4eb3d$07170ca0$3142003e@ADSL

Disclosure: I help run a third party archiving service, and this topic was
discussed quite a bit previously.  [1] Nonetheless it seems like a good
time revisit given the current discussion about archive wishlists.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg08772.html