incomplete reply link in archived posts
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
GNU Mailman |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
When viewing the archived messages/posts, one can reply to a post by
clicking the mailto link next to the author's name. This is of the form
mailto:<email address hidden>
************
THE BUG
************
The unique id for In-Reply-To is present only for posts that are replies to
another post. The top level posts don't have a unique id in the mailto
link. It is simply blank like it's shown below.
mailto:<email address hidden>
******************
WHY IT MATTERS
******************
Some people may disable mail delivery when the mailing list becomes a high
volume one. They can see the archived messages through the web front-end.
If they are still subscribed to the mailing list, they can even reply to
the list by clicking the above mentioned mailto link.
For messages which are replies to another post, the mailto link is properly
formed having a unique messageid for use in the In-Reply-To header.
However, for the top level posts, the mailto link is incomplete as the
In-Reply-To is simply blank. If someone replied to a top level post by
clicking it's reply link, the reply message will appear out-of-sync as a
different top-level post instead of being a reply to the original post.
[http://
Originator: NO
It's actually worse than you say. The In-Reply-To= in the mailto URL does
not contain the Message-ID: of the message being viewed. It contains the
In-Reply-To: of the message being viewed, and can be empty for a
subordinate message in a thread if that message doesn't contain an
In-Reply-To: and was threaded by References:. Thus, even when present, it
is wrong and results in improper threading of replies that use it.
I will look at fixing this, but the archiver is complex and fragile, so I
don't know how difficult this will be.