As a kind of preface: I am not trying to convince that Message-ID as
link to a message is ideal. It is still useful however. I hope, it may
be made more convenient for users.
On 16/02/2026 12:23 pm, David Wright wrote:
On Sat 14 Feb 2026 at 11:19:27 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote:
On 26/01/2026 2:42 pm, David wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jan 2026 at 03:18, Max Nikulin wrote:
On 26/01/2026 5:01 am, David wrote:
On Sun, 25 Jan 2026 at 18:01, D. R. Evans wrote:
(see my e-mail
<[email protected]> in another
sub-thread),
If you want to reference other list messages, can you please do that by
providing links into the list archive which can be found at for
example: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2026/01/threads.html
David, if you wish to open that message in a browser then
you may easily do it:
↑↑↑↑↑↑ ?
Sorry, I can not figure out what caused your question.
Having Message-ID, it is more convenient to open that message inside
mailer
I think that way depends on the target message being in the
mailer's currently open mailbox.
At least Thunderbird and Gmail web UI maintain "global" index for the
profile. So one may open message from another mail folder (or even from
another mail account in the case of Thunderbird).
or in another web mailing list archive.
Do you mean some site that carries debian-user, or are you broadening
this discussion to other mailing lists besides Debian's? If so, are
you saying that other mailing lists use …/msgid-search/?m=MESSAGE_ID
URLs? I don't find that to be so.
DDOS (intentional or just caused by scraping bot crowd) is not something
exceptional nowadays. So having Message-ID, it is possible to get the
same message from alternative sources, e.g.
<https://marc.info/[email protected]>
<https://mail-archive.com/search?l=mid&[email protected]>
In the case of public inbox instances (e.g. kernel.org archives),
Message-ID is primary identifier.
Message-ID itself is not a link, and I'll hazard a guess that many
people reading this list may not know how to turn a Message-ID into
a URL. Whatever writes the List-Archive URLs doesn't get this right
either.
Message-ID is an identifier that may be converted to various links.
Aren't we here to learn something new?
If a mail
list archive moved to other site or removed completely then "msg00411"
is not a helpful identifier. It can not be used for obtaining the same
message from another archive.
I wasn't aware that the list archive would be moved. I see that:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/1994/01/msg00000.html
is still where it always was.
I did not mean namely lists.debian.org, but net is full of old broken
links to gmane.org. Variants with Message-ID are a bit easier to fix
than article numbers.
I admit, Message-ID's usually have no
hints concerning date and mailing list name. Actually I prefer
redundancy and references with sender, destination, and timestamp:
David to debian-user. Re: Referencing mail messages (was: Use
grub-rescue on a non-bootable RAID-formatted drive) Mon, 26 Jan 2026
07:42:56 +0000.
<mid:CAMPXz=q3itpmvy2nz8n0j5epusnuo0mxy2icyhj3qk9o1ra...@mail.gmail.com>
(Or https://...)
So generic search may be used to obtain the message. I am realizing
that almost nobody will use detailed links.
Wow, it's hard enough to get some people to attribute there quotes,
let alone persuade them to write references like that.
Do you see any value in references with redundancy? The problem is to
make tools for easy creation of them available for users.
I believe,
<https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/?m=CAMPXz=q3itpmvy2nz8n0j5epusnuo0mxy2icyhj3qk9o1ra...@mail.gmail.com>
is not really worse
It has to be whenever it doesn't work.
I have tried it in Firefox and
curl -I
'https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/?m=CAMPXz=q3itpmvy2nz8n0j5epusnuo0mxy2icyhj3qk9o1ra...@mail.gmail.com'
...
location: /debian-user/2026/01/msg00492.html
5) Sometimes the Message-ID search of the Debian mail archives fails to
find messages, so I prefer to use a method that seems to always work.
See "?m=" above.
The ?m= construction seems unnecessary for most Message-IDs,
yet it's insufficient make those like the ones at the end of
this post actually work without correcting them.
I expect that "?m=" may be made unnecessary even for "/" and "+", but
some effort (and an experienced Perl developer) is required.
AFAICT, the debian-user server can handle …/msgid-search/?m=MESSAGE_ID
URLs perfectly correctly for all the Message-IDs that I've seen used
on the list, but you have to correct some of them manually yourself.
Percent encoding may be necessary for some characters. Ideally it should
be avoided, so copy-paste of Message-ID to URL should be enough.
On 26/01/2026 12:17 pm, David Wright wrote:
Some of the URLs I am sent in emails have hundreds of "random"
characters in them. I've just turned up a 1478-character URL just
for unsubscribing from PlutoTV marketing emails.
Private links may be long. For "public" links with Message-ID it is
better to constrain length and used characters to reasonable values.
"+" is more tricky, it is not enough to just insert "?m=".
I think RFC3986 implies that safe URLs should be generated from
such Message-IDs by the list remailer,
Certainly smartlist should be fixed, but identifiers without "/", "+",
"$", etc. are more convenient for humans since they do not require
escaping. My idea is that MUAs that send messages might be fixed.
David Wright, I have noticed that you sometimes skips explicit
"https://"; prefix. At least Thunderbird does not make links active
ones.
[...]
I think most browsers will add http: or https: for you when you
paste one of my URLs lacking the protocol.
The issue is that neither active hyperlink nore "copy link location"
context menu option are available, so it is necessary to select link
text from the beginning to its end, it is not enough to just click on
the link.
BTW, the web archiver also appears unable to form these URLs when the
Message-IDs look like Y/+tJdQluFDMC4Ci@use or ZPJmz/[email protected]
As a result, the Message-ID is rendered as dead text, rather than as
an active link.
Fixing mhonarc template may be more difficult than e.g. smartlist.
