Re: Conversation View / org-wl-store-link Enhancements

[David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

At Tue, 12 Oct 2010 21:22:30 +0200,
David Maus wrote:
> 
> [1  <text/plain; UTF-8 (quoted-printable)>]
> At Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:23:48 -0700,
> Erik Hetzner wrote:
> > 
> > Regarding org-mode, I am going to propose to the org-mode list a mid:
> > link (similar to RFC 2392). It has always kind of bothered me that org
> > mode mail links are tied to a folder & a mail reader. 
> > 
> > Wouldn’t it be better if we could use:
> > 
> >   [[mid:m2pqvs5byz.wl%dave@boostpro.com][Email from David Abrahams: Conversation View / org-wl-sto]]
> > 
> > instead?

Might be much better for those of us who keep the big archive or
otherwise index everything.  Do you need a slash in that link format?

> The problem I see here is that the message-id identifies the message,
> but not its location.  A message with a given message-id could exist
> literally everywhere: In IMAP mailbox A, local mailbox B, on a usenet
> server... Or in all three places.
> 
> Without the information where the message resides, Org is unable to
> resolve or dereference the link -- unless you introduce some mechanism
> to tie the mid: link to a resolving function, that in turn is tied to
> a user specific mailer...  Even worse: Without the folder information
> the mid: is tied to a specific user setup (mailboxes and the like).

It's not a problem for those of us who keep one or two archive folders
that hold a copy of everything.  If you use GMail that's naturally
what you end up with, but I was doing that on my own dovecot server
for years before I switched.

> The folder information is vital to be able to resolve the link,
> e.g. during export.  You can define rules that translate a link to a
> location in your realm to a public accessible link.  E.g. if the link
> points to a nntp folder at gmane, you can easily derive a http: link
> when exporting a file to html.
> 
> Storing the link with mailer and folder is the right thing to do.

I know that's needed for some peoples' workflow, but not for mine, and
it's certainly not a built-in requirement for email links.  For
example, if you look at the org-mac-message-* stuff that comes with
org, you'll see that the org link only stores the UID of the message.
Apple Mail indexes everything you have, so it can dig the message out
of whatever folder it happens to reside in.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com