>From: Donald Rosenthal <rosen@clvm.clarkson.edu>
>Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 09:22:18 -0500
>I am using Majordomo for On-Line Chemistry Conferences.
>At any one time there are about 700 subscribers.
>A typical conference will last several months and generate 300 to 400
>messages. To assist in untangling the various discussion threads
>it is necessary to reference one or more previous messages.
>It would be very useful if messages could be automatically numbered
>in the order they are received by the server. Then a participant can
>simply refer to messages 39 and 55 (for example).
>Can this feature be include in a future update of Majordomo?
Are you proposing changing the Message-IDs when received at your server? That
would be a Bad Thing.
The proper header to do this in is References. It's up to the author of the
message to cite any Message IDs he references in this header. Whether or not
his mail client makes this simple and straightforward to do isn't under your
control.
I guess you could add an X- header that your server would assign a number in,
but a list member's mail client wouldn't make it any more or less easy to cite
these numbers than the actual Message IDs.
What would be cool would be hypertext links to the message archived on the
server using the original Message IDs which could be rendered by the mail
client based on the user informing it that such an archive exists. The archive
would need some sort of table to translate between the Message ID and the deep
link to the message.
The In-Reply-To header is supposed to contain the Message ID of the message
being replied to, but many mail clients don't add it. If In-Reply-To always
contained a string of Message IDs representing the thread back to the root
message (as most News clients do for References), but Mail clients almost never
retain the old In-Reply-To information. Oh, well.
References:
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