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, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "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. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp