On 26/02/2026 12:56 pm, David Wright wrote:

Sure, perhaps MIDs? may become more useful, but this subthread
is in and about a list that has an open archive of posts, and
where advice to write URL references using its direct addresses
was criticised as being contraversial.

Sorry for long delay before response.

To be precise, *a bit* controversial and in the case when Message-ID was provided. My point is that Message-ID in some cases and for some users
is more convenient than an HTTP URL without any info concerning that
message.

On Thu 19 Feb 2026 at 22:43:40 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote:

<https://marc.info/?i=eca2ee9a-ae7c-46b1-ab6a-101365e2a73f@gmail.com>
<https://mail-archive.com/search?l=mid&q=eca2ee9a-ae7c-46b1-ab6a-101365e2a73f@gmail.com>

More MID?URL constructions for tyros to learn, and unnecessary for
this list.

I am unsure if it will be unnecessary next moment. Currently
wiki.debian.org blocks the gateway of my ISP. I would not be surprised
to find the same anti-bot protection at lists.debian.org tomorrow. What
you consider as "direct" links may easily became more hassle than any
variant of Message-ID-based links.

I'm not familiar with gmane.org at all, and don't really see the
relevance to this list.

Gmane is another archive of mailing lists (including debian-user). In
the past it was available through HTTP and it had more convenient UI
than MhonArc at lists.debian.org.

On Sat 14 Feb 2026 at 11:19:27 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote:>>>> Actually I prefer

redundancy and references with sender, destination, and timestamp:

David to debian-user. Re: Referencing mail messages (was: Use
grub-rescue on a non-bootable RAID-formatted drive) Mon, 26 Jan 2026
07:42:56 +0000. <mid:CAMPXz=q3iTPMvy2nz8n0J5Epusnuo0MXY2icyhJ3qK9O1rasRA@mail.gmail.com>
(Or https://...)

So generic search may be used to obtain the message. I am realizing
that almost nobody will use detailed links.

[...]

If the top of this post, viz:

> On 16/02/2026 12:23 pm, David Wright wrote:
> > On Sat 14 Feb 2026 at 11:19:27 (+0700), Max Nikulin wrote:
> > > On 26/01/2026 2:42 pm, David wrote:
> > > > On Mon, 26 Jan 2026 at 03:18, Max Nikulin wrote:
> > > > > On 26/01/2026 5:01 am, David wrote:
> > > > > > On Sun, 25 Jan 2026 at 18:01, D. R. Evans wrote:

were converted to the format you gave, it would expand to 18 lines
of text (probably more, when some overflow the right margin), and
it would be more difficult to see who wrote what when.

I had no intention to include all messages from the References header
when citing a message. (By the way, they are clickable in Thunderbird.) Certainly messages from the same thread may be mentioned in brief form.
Your example has reasonable amount of details. More may be obtained
using headers of current message. (However I do not like when people
omit sender or date of cited messages.) Providing an example, I was
assuming a message from another thread.

Sure, most of the time it works, just like List-Archive links. But
I find no more success when using curl with the "delinquent" MIDs
I mentioned earlier in the subthread, like:

$ curl -I 'https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/Y/+tJdQluFDMC4Ci@use'
HTTP/2 404

I am aware of the issue and I am pushing you toward "?m=" variant that
allows to avoid the issue with "/". I admit "+" must be replaced by "%2b"

curl -I 'https://lists.debian.org/msgid-search/?m=Y/%2btJdQluFDMC4Ci@use' HTTP/2 302

Percent encoding may be necessary for some characters. Ideally it
should be avoided, so copy-paste of Message-ID to URL should be
enough.

I believe you. But it's not happened in over ten years on debian-user.

I noticed discussion of the issue some years ago, but I could not recall
if a bug number was mentioned.

David Wright, I have noticed that you sometimes skips explicit
"https://" prefix. At least Thunderbird does not make links active
ones.

[...]
The issue is that neither active hyperlink nore "copy link location"
context menu option are available, so it is necessary to select link
text from the beginning to its end, it is not enough to just click on
the link.

I don't feel too bad about this, because it's not good practice to
click on links in emails without some thought.

However text that is not recognized as link increases a chance of
mistake when incorrect part of text is selected (truncated URL or extra characters).

Fixing mhonarc template may be more difficult than e.g. smartlist.

I'm familiar with neither.

smartlist adds "List-Archive" (it should be "Archived-At" though) with
URL that sometimes invalid. MhonArc formats messages as web pages.
Custom template, not upstream source code, should be fixed in the latter
case. For me an obstacle is lack of experience with Perl. I do not
expect complications with finding specific line of code, but the
question is what should be used instead.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.13
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)