Making things easier for lurkers (was Re: Bug in mailing lists; unfriendly to non-subscribers)

[Tim]

On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 14:43 +0900, Joel Rees wrote:
> I'm thinking it would be nice to have the html archives set up so  
> that, if you've logged in (as you do to change your mail settings),  
> you could click a link in the post and the list server would ship you
> a copy of the post you're looking at, with all the addresses clipped,
> and the original sender replaced with the list address, and the  
> message-ID intact for threading.

Sounds reasonable, and I recall some list servers already had the
ability to send a particular message upon request (might have been
majordomo, but it's years since I've used a service with that feature).

However, have a look at gmane.org.  If you have a usenet client, you can
already do this with them (albeit as news rather than mail).  They may
even have a reply through their webpage interface, as well.  But I
haven't looked for a while.

You may be re-inventing the wheel.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.