feature request: fetch archived emails

[anatoly techtonik]

In Mailman it is impossible to reply to a message posted to unsubscribed list. When sent after subscription with appropriate subject and quoting it is unlikely to be added into thread as a followup. For this sake it would be convenient to have email command for receiving previous message or messages from archives.

[Adam McGreggor (adam-amyl)]

> In Mailman it is impossible to reply to a message posted to unsubscribed list.

I don't quite understand that line. The setting in generic_nonmember_action
should control who can post to lists, yes?

Each list-admin has his own views on posting/list-config.

> When sent after subscription with appropriate subject and quoting
> it is unlikely to be added into thread as a followup.

Fix-up your References: header?

> For this sake it would be convenient to have email command for
> receiving previous message or messages from archives.

I tend to use wget/fetch pointing to e.g.,
    http://example.com/mailman/private/$LISTNAME.mbox/$LISTNAME.mbox
and then poking my MUA at the grabbed mbox

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Take a look for example at <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-October/063490.html>. The munged address next to my name at the top of the page is a mailto: link that will generate a properly threaded reply to that message as long as the MUA handling the mailto: understands the In-Reply-To= fragment in the URI.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Regarding fetching
    http://example.com/mailman/private/$LISTNAME.mbox/$LISTNAME.mbox
these files can be quite large. The periodic text file, e.g.
    http://www.example.com/pipermail/LISTNAME/yyyy-mmmm.txt.gz
is more manageable and has all the necessary headers for proper threading of replies.

[anatoly techtonik (techtonik)]

Thanks for the hints. In-Reply-To is especially cool, but I have no
idea how to use them from GMail.

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Mark Sapiro <email address hidden> wrote:
> Take a look for example at <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-
> users/2008-October/063490.html>. The munged address next to my name at
> the top of the page is a mailto: link that will generate a properly
> threaded reply to that message as long as the MUA handling the mailto:
> understands the In-Reply-To= fragment in the URI.
>
> --
> feature request: fetch archived emails
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/283751
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

--
--anatoly t.

[Nikodemus Siivola (nikodemus)]

I miss this semi-regularly -- maybe a few times a year.

For some reason an email goes astray or doesn't arrive (doesn't matter if I binned it by accident or if my mailhost was down or whatever), or I want to reply to a message from before my subscription.

Then I always pine for the bad old days of majordomo when I could send a request for /specific/ old mails, and lo! there they would be -- and everything archives nicely and conversations remain threaded.

Getting the list archives isn't always possible -- not every list makes the mbox available (eg. SourceForge uses mailman and doesn't give mbox files to hoi polloi) -- and reply munging is tedious, and possible with all clients.

Please, please, please consider this. This is my only major beef with mailman.

[Nikodemus Siivola (nikodemus)]

s/possible with all clients/not possible with all clients/ obviously...

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I think we'll probably do something like this in Mailman 3, but also, I'm much more fond of providing a Gmane-like NNTP interface to the archives. I find myself subscribing to fewer mailing lists these days and just reading (and replying!) to them via Gmane. Works great.

[Richard Wackerbarth (wacky)]

This seems "out of place" for MM, per se. Providing this material is something that is intimately tied to the archiver.

As I see it, the only thing that MM can do is to provide a "pass thru" conduit to whatever archiver the installation has chosen.

Wacky

On Jun 13, 2011, at 1:11 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

> I think we'll probably do something like this in Mailman 3, but also,
> I'm much more fond of providing a Gmane-like NNTP interface to the
> archives. I find myself subscribing to fewer mailing lists these days
> and just reading (and replying!) to them via Gmane. Works great.
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mailman
> Coders, which is subscribed to GNU Mailman.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/283751
>
> Title:
> feature request: fetch archived emails

[Nikodemus Siivola (nikodemus)]

Out of date architecturally, maybe, but from usage perspective it's a very clear fit. While I'm not at all knowledgeable on mailman internals, isn't it mailman that writes the mbox file? I don't see how things like:

 resend last 10 mails

 resend last 3 days

 resend date 2011-06-11

 resend dates 2011-06-10 - 2011-06-12

 resend id <email address hidden>

 resend ids <email address hidden> - <another-id>

would require more than trivial parsing or secondary indexing of the mbox. It's also mailman who does sending of mail, not the archiver, right? :)

[Nikodemus Siivola (nikodemus)]

Me type good again. "Out of place", even.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

Mailman 2.1 may or may not write a .mbox file. This is a site configuration. In comment #5 you say "Getting the list archives isn't always possible -- not every list makes the mbox available (eg. SourceForge uses mailman and doesn't give mbox files to hoi polloi)". I'm not actually a member of any SourceForge mailing lists, so I can't verify the following, but it is clear from the few lists I looked at that Sourceforge lists are archived using a non-Mailman external archiver.

However, It appears that one may be able to get a SourceForge list's listname.mbox file via https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox if one first authenticates as a list member, by going to say https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/private/listname and logging in. Also, that may take you to an index page with links to the periodic text files - see comment #3.

In any case, regardless of how trivial you think it might be to implement this, Mailman 2.1 is currently in bug and security fix only mode and for Mailman 3, comment #8 applies.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

On Jun 13, 2011, at 07:22 PM, Richard Wackerbarth wrote:

>This seems "out of place" for MM, per se. Providing this material is
>something that is intimately tied to the archiver.
>
>As I see it, the only thing that MM can do is to provide a "pass thru"
>conduit to whatever archiver the installation has chosen.

I think this is exactly right for read-only NNTP, and in fact the current
MM3 NNTP bridge could probably be rewritten as an archiver plugin (that's not
a bad idea for someone looking to do a bite-size branch!). I think there
would need to be tighter integration for the posting side, a la Gmane. Unlike
Gmane though, if you post through NNTP and we "know who you are", we wouldn't
need to do the verification dance.

-Barry