On Thu 19 Feb 2026 at 22:43:40 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote: > 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.
Sure, perhaps MIDs¹ may become more useful, but this subthread is in and about a list that has an open archive of posts, and where advice to write URL references using its direct addresses was criticised as being contraversial. > 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. Perhaps some of the manipulations required to turn MIDs into URLs mentioned below will make "easily" seem questionable. > > > > > 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). Well, that might explain doc.evans's use of MIDs, and David's advice would remind doc.evans that most people don't have this facility. > > > > > 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]> More MID→URL constructions for tyros to learn, and unnecessary for this list. > In the case of public inbox instances (e.g. kernel.org archives), > Message-ID is primary identifier. Few novices hanging around there, I suspect. > > 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 anyone is still reading this subthread, then maybe. But the main thread was about rescuing an unbootable disk; perhaps not the time for learning MID→URL conversion techniques. > > > 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'm not familiar with gmane.org at all, and don't really see the relevance to this list. > > > 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. If the top of this post, viz: > 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: were converted to the format you gave, it would expand to 18 lines of text (probably more, when some overflow the right margin), and it would be more difficult to see who wrote what when. > > > 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 Sure, most of the time it works, just like List-Archive links. But I find no more success when using curl with the "delinquent" MIDs I mentioned earlier in the subthread, like: $ curl -I 'https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/Y/+tJdQluFDMC4Ci@use' HTTP/2 404 encoding: utf-8 x-content-type-options: nosniff x-frame-options: sameorigin referrer-policy: no-referrer x-xss-protection: 1 permissions-policy: interest-cohort=() strict-transport-security: max-age=15552000 x-clacks-overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 date: Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:53:06 GMT server: Apache $ The output lacks the location line. > > > > 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. I believe you. But it's not happened in over ten years on debian-user. > > > 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. Yes, I've not seen longer than ~160 characters here, but even that does seem rather excessive. > > > "+" 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. I don't feel too bad about this, because it's not good practice to click on links in emails without some thought. In addition, my ability to post here is sometimes thwarted by seemingly irrelevant details, either caused by an outward spam-checker (see X-Spamd-Result in any of my posts for a possible contender), or else by Debian's filters (which eventually blocked me for about two months last year). I usually get notified of outward rejections, though without any clear indication of why. (Spammers would improve their hit rate were this information divulged.) Debian usually just loses the post. My personal record for trimming, resubmitting and waiting for a post to appear is ten submissions; and the reason? It contained the string: @ g m x . u s in the attribution. No problem with that in the header, only the body. So you'll understand if I indulge in a few cargo-cult idiosyncrasies to increase my odds of posting. > > 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. I'm familiar with neither. ¹ MID ≡ Message-ID. Cheers, David.
