The problem with mail is that messages aren’t intrinsically addressable
If we had URNs for mail items, we’d have a much easier time finding emails. Think about it. You can find the address of a web page, of a blog item, of just about anything that matters. But you can’t do it for a mail message. At least not in a way that’s useful. That’s absurd.It doesn’t matter what operating system you use: why can you not construct a list of email addresses (say in another email). Why can’t I point to an email message, right click, and select “Copy link” and then write “Hey Jim, you haven’t answered <paste>mailid:foobar” Surely it’s simple to do too? Doesn’t every mail message have a unique ID, Message-Id. On OS X, surely Mail can locate a message given an ID, and surely we can rewire the internals to recognize a different type of URN? We have “http:” and a few others, so how about “mailid:fooobar@zap.com” being a link, and if I click on it, Mail locates the message? And if the message is not there, give me a 404. What am I missing here? Doesn’t a sent mail have the same Message-Id as the received email? This would be so useful, there must be a reason why somebody hasn’t implemented it. Extensions could offer support for naming the attachment in a message too.What brought this on? I was playing with Kinkless GTD, following some of Merlin Mann’s excellent advice. Here I am organizing projects and actions and reference material. I can drag AddressBook items, spreadsheets, documents, you name it. Woo hoo. I can’t drag Mail items though. WT! This would be useful here, for programs like kGTD, but elsewhere too. Mail messages should be intrinsically addressable.Aside: If you’re interested extensions to Mail.app, check out Hawk Wings.
August 15th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
While this train of thought doesn’t exactly address the above: I’ve been wishing that emails from lists that have web based archives would put the URL for the email at the bottom of the email.
That sounds confusing.
The use-case is this: I read a message I like in ScrumDevelopment (or whatever list) and want to bookmark/link to it. I have to go login to the Yahoo! Groups web archive UI, find the message, and then I have the link.
I’d much rather have just had the link in the email to click on.
August 16th, 2006 at 1:29 am
Good one Coté. I just fired up GMail in the hope…I sort of drafted a URI schema document in my head, and one of the aspects was that mail messages should be addressable on the web too. I guess it would be something like:
mail:messageID[:xxmountjoy@gmail.com]
But you’d need a different way of processing these for every web mail implementation, unless they all provided a standard RESTian service say for calling up the desired mail message.
I think Leopard, the new OS X release, fixes my problem at least. It looks like their todos allows you to embed pointers to mail messages. I hope that they’ve done this “right” and that these pointers can be embedded (and recognized) in all sorts of documents. (ie. a URI scheme of some sort)