[Mailman-Users] Feature idea: List-Msg-Archive header

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:46 PM -0500 2005-08-22, Jim C. Nasby wrote:

>  Many times I find myself wishing that one of the headers that mailman
>  appends would give me a URL I could go to to get that exact email in the
>  archive. I know there's often a delay between mail being sent and
>  showing up in the archive, but it seems like a good error message should
>  handle that situation...

	It's not possible to do this within Mailman, at least not the way 
it's written today.  At the time the message is being sent out to 
recipients, it has not yet been written to the archive, and therefore 
it is impossible to tell what the URL to that message will be.

	Moreover, sometimes the archival process can be rather lengthy, 
compared to being able to quickly dump off the outgoing message to 
the MTA.  In that case, doing the archive step first would add a 
noticeable delay to the message being sent to recipients.


	One thing I'd like to see is that the archival process be changed 
from using sequence numbers to using a slice of an MD-5 hash of the 
incoming message.  This has multiple benefits:

	1.  When you go to re-generate your archives based on the
		contents of an mbox file, none of the existing messages
		will have their sequence number changed.  This means that
		all external references to specific messages in the archives
		will still remain valid after the archives have been rebuilt.

		Today, this is not true, and the FAQ and other documents have
		to be updated to reference the correct messages, if the
		archives ever have to be rebuilt.

	2.  It should be possible to know what the URL to that message
		would be before it is actually created by the archival
		process.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.