[Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users] RFC: X-Archive header fields

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Moving to Mailman-Developers per BAW.  CC to -Users; Reply-To set to
-Developers only.

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > Hi Richard,
 > 
 > Please see RFC 5064: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5064.txt

Argh.  You'd think they'd get in touch with the maintainers and users
of the most popular mailing list software before approving it.  It
doesn't even mention the word "thread".

If somebody knows offhand how to find the archived discussions for the
RFC, please post an URL.  It's hard to imagine these guys didn't
already cover a lot of the ground that we'll want to (especially the
point that X-Archived-Thread may be a YAGNI).

Richard Hartman writes:

 > I was wondering if anyone would think X-Archive-Thread and
 > X-Archive-Mail would make sense.

A couple of minutes' reflection suggests to me that this distinction
may be artificial.  Specifically,

(1) It's not obvious to me how many such distinctions make sense.  For
example, User A may wish to jump to head of thread to see the whole
thing, while User B may wish to jump to most recent to see if there's
been a resolution (or maybe the list is infested with top-posters so
reading the most recent in last-line-first mode is the most efficient
way to get the whole thread!)  Some users may want to see an index,
which might be by-date or by-author or by-subject.

(2) This URL "works" in the sense that you get the specified document,
and the query part is ignored.  I don't know if this is an artifact of
the server daemon or if it's part of the specification of the query
part.

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt?bogusquery=doesnotmatter

(3) In current best practice (heck, even pipermail does it) each
message contains "up" pointers to one or more relevant indicies.  This
means that you're at most three clicks from where you want to be
(archive link in current message, thread index, thread-head message).

Given those three points, I suggest that a better way to do this is to
provide some standard queries *relative to an archived message* that
dynamic archive servers can support, while with a static server the
user is not very far from where she wants to be in any case.

Some additional comments: (1) suggests that "archived thread" is
premature in the RFC tradition; there's no practice to support it yet
AFAIK.  We could support it, but use of URLs with derived queries
generated by MUAs is somewhat more flexible (there's no backward
compatibility problem with archaic X-Headers).