Mailing List Permalinks

Currently I am subscribed to 19 mailing lists and there are a handful more that I plan on joining (when I get around to it). The benefits of a mailing list (especially in the Linux world) is the massive amount of useful information that is often shared by developers and experienced users that may not be found elsewhere (assuming you ignore the useless discussions).

I often link to web page posts to mailing lists on this site. For example, anything posted to the fedora-list can be seen at the fedora-list Archives. Or if you have ever read Fedora News this is done a lot!

What I would really like is for a quick method to get from the email in my mail client to the email’s URL at the given mailing list archive. I think of this as some sort of “mailing list permalink”. Since not everyone signs up for mailing lists, I want a quicker way of sharing useful information sometimes buried in the archives.

With the number of mailing lists I use, the only practical mail client is Google’s Gmail, and of course I pretty much only use Mozilla Firefox. So I imagine a Firefox Extension and/or a Grease Monkey script could insert a link into each Gmail message, or perhaps a “Right-Click > Search for this email at the archives” option on the context menu? … Alternatively, I would even consider switching to a desktop email client (Mozilla Thunderbird is really the only choice) if I could install some sort of plugin/extension to do the same thing.

Has anyone ever considered this? Does some combination of software achieve this? I welcome any ideas or suggestions on how to do this. I plan to investigate this further and maybe even start up my own project if I get some time.

Posted in: Linux, Miscellaneous, Software,