Subject: [Tools-discuss] reply button on ietf mail archive

From: "Jeffrey (Zhaohui) Zhang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 15:36:07 +0000

Hi,

For each archived message, could there be a button so that one could "reply" to a posted message? I don't keep all mailing list messages, and sometimes I need to go back to an archived one and reply to it. Currently there is no convenient way to do it.

I suppose this is not an uncommon situation people may run into. How do you deal with it?

Thanks.
Jeffrey

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From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 11:39:37 -0500

> I suppose this is not an uncommon situation people may run into. How do you deal with it?

I know we had put out a bid for an IMAP interface to the messages -- do 
we know where that work stands? It would address Jeffrey's use case.

/a

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 12:47:33 +0100

> we know where that work stands? It would address Jeffrey's use case.

Bids received, evaluated; awarded to ISODE.

I tried to find pointers to IAOC materials on this, but failed.

Best regards,

	Henrik

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 10:19:55 -0400

> From: "Jeffrey (Zhaohui) Zhang" <[email-masked]>
> 
> For each archived message, could there be a button so that one could
> "reply" to a posted message? I don't keep all mailing list messages,
> and sometimes I need to go back to an archived one and reply to
> it. Currently there is no convenient way to do it.

I must be behind the times; how do you use your web browser as a
mailer?

> I suppose this is not an uncommon situation people may run into. How

I'd copy the message into the mail-composition buffer of my
mail-reader (Rmail under Emacs) and construct the reply message there.

Of course, that requires that I can extract the actual original
message out of the archive, including headers like Message-Id.

Dale

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From: "Jeffrey (Zhaohui) Zhang" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:40:42 +0000

Dale,

Basically the button would automate the manual steps you described - it'd bring up a message composition window and pre-poulate it with the correspdoning archived message.

Jeffrey

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dale R. Worley [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 10:20 AM
> To: Jeffrey (Zhaohui) Zhang
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: [Tools-discuss] reply button on ietf mail archive
>

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:44:27 -0400

> I must be behind the times; how do you use your web browser as a

An appropriate mailto: URL ought to invoke your MUA from the browser.
In the days of all-in-one Mozilla this was really easy; then we got Firefox
and IE, and they split apart, and who knows which is the MUA... and Linux
desktops had no way... now with GNOME3 (apparently), there are sane ways to
do this with dbus... and Chrome will ask you if you want to use GMAIL
when it sees a mailto: URL.

    > message out of the archive, including headers like Message-Id.

Yes, that's my take too --- if you really want to reply in-thread, you really
need the entire message into your MUA, and I hope that with the IMAP stuff,
that means that it will become a imap:// URL, which maybe our MUAs can cope
with.  I think GNUS can deal with that.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:18:29 -0400

> From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
> 

OK, that works well enough for me on Firefox, I can right-click and
select "copy the URI", and then paste that into a mail-composition
window.  But the devil is getting the original message headers and
contents.  But perhaps an imap: URL lets you retrieve that, so all you
need for your MUA is a "set up a reply to the message described by
this URL" operation.

> with.  I think GNUS can deal with that.

In the short run, it would be helpful if there was a way to get the
original mail message out of the archive web pages.

Dale

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:39:21 -0400

> need for your MUA is a "set up a reply to the message described by

Sometimes, you can add headers to mailto:, as in ?subject=foo.. I don't know
if this is specified, or was added ad-hoc.

    > original mail message out of the archive web pages.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/roll/HBhvfpXCbX193pXtU7IZ7xLZG1c#

it's pretty close to the original... but I agree, .txt extension would be
nice, and I think the IMAP interface will do exactly that for us

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From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 09:44:13 -0700

Hi,

The more I think about it, the more I like this idea of adding a reply button.  If this can be done without a lot of work, then I think it is worth adding it to the current tool and not wait for the imap capabilities.  I have no plans to use imap to access the IETF lists, but would use a reply button in the current web interface.

Bob

On Oct 30, 2014, at 9:39 AM, Michael Richardson <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Tools-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss
> 
> Please reports datatracker.ietf.org bugs at http://tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb
> Please reports tools.ietf.org bugs at http://tools.ietf.org/tools/issues or
> send email to [email-masked]

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 12:31:47 -0500

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 09:44:13AM -0700, Bob Hinden wrote:
> The more I think about it, the more I like this idea of adding a reply
> button.  If this can be done without a lot of work, then I think it is
> worth adding it to the current tool and not wait for the imap
> capabilities.  I have no plans to use imap to access the IETF lists,
> but would use a reply button in the current web interface.

A web forum lite, basically, which would require:

 - we'd have to stop worrying about publishing e-mail addresses in the
   archives; spam is a fact of life

   (or we'd have to have logins (IETF accounts, as it were))

 - the archiver would have to be updated to generate reply-to-list,
   reply-to-sender, reply-to-all buttons with mailto: URIs with
   In-Reply-To set properly and so on and so forth.

The IMAP solution seems best to me, though I'm not opposed to the above.

Or, if not using mailto: URIs, a proper web forum (ick), but let's not
go there please.

Nico
--

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From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 10:39:45 -0700

Nico,

>   archives; spam is a fact of life

Aren't email address already in the archives?  I see them.

Now that you mention it, we don't think that spammers will use imap to harvest our archives.  Clearly more efficient that having to subscribe to each list :-(

>   (or we'd have to have logins (IETF accounts, as it were))

I log into the tool now to see private lists.  This would be an OK restriction.

Bob

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 19:41:38 -0700

>    In-Reply-To set properly and so on and so forth.

That's a nice listing of the issues to worry about:  authenticating the
replying author and their email address, and enabling choice of the
addresses to reply to.

The site already enforced a login requirement for access to some
functions; so requiring it for reply ought to be easy.

The archive already shows addresses, albeit in the amusingly meager
re-coded " at " form.  (What is ironic about that particular attempt at
obfuscation is that the original mail format spec, RFC733, permitted use
of either "@" or " at "...

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

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From: [email-masked] (Dale R. Worley)
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 11:04:09 -0400

> if this is specified, or was added ad-hoc.

Michael's message prompted me to go read the RFC like I should have
before.  RFC 2368 defines the use of "?subject=..." etc.  It also
defines "?body=...", so you can have the URL include the quoted body
of the message to reply to.  (As long as your software handles
infinitely long URLs.)

So maybe this is a lot easier to implement than it looks at first
sight.

Dale

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From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:59:47 -0700

> So maybe this is a lot easier to implement than it looks at first

If someone is thinking about taking this on, please note that RFC 6068 
has obsoleted RFC 2368. The most important difference is a shift from 
ASCII to UTF-8.

/a

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From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 17:01:10 -0700

> So maybe this is a lot easier to implement than it looks at first

Oh, and I forgot to mention -- mailto: only lets you use text/plain 
bodies. Probably not a huge deal, but it does mean that implementing 
this feature would require the ability to flatten HTML mail into text/plain.

/a

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From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 19:33:13 -0500

Well, I mean, the obvious thing to do is to write a "lite" MUA in
JavaScript and have it produce the completed mailto: and...  never
mind, that's not a good joke.

If anyone does this, I'd say have a button for viewing the message
with an MUA -- an IMAP URL, and then the reply-to-author/list/all
buttons with no body, just subject and in-reply-to (the user can
always cut-n-paste to quote, and there could a
pre-angle-bracket-quoted version of the mail to cut-n-past from).
Besides, that would force users to think about what to quote.  That'd
be the 80% solution that makes most people happy.

Making users think about what to quote would be the Killer App here.
Hmmm, yes, we should definitely do this!

Nico
--