Dynamic Discussion List Footers

August 25, 2006 3:30 PM

I need help creating a dynamic footer for the e-mail messages in a Mailman discussion list.

I want to build a stronger connection between the individual e-mail messages and the web archive that is generated and stored on Dreamhost. Each time a message is posted to the list, it also gets assigned a unique id and added to the web archive. Here's our archive.

Mailman can add a static footer to the bottom of each e-mail message. We're currently doing that. What I'd like though is a way to add a link in the footer of every e-mail directly to that thread in the archives. A dynamic footer. This seems to involve knowing the unique ID for the message before the e-mail is forwarded out to the recipients, which isn't trivial. But what's most difficult right now is figuring out how to add any dynamic information at all to the footer of the e-mails in the discussion list.

Can Mailman do this? Are there other discussion list tools that would be better suited to this goal? If it's not feasible to add the unique ID to each e-mail message, then it might also work if I could construct the link with the date and subject of the e-mail. I'm hoping there's a more elegant way to go about it.

posted by Jeff Howard to computers & internet (1 comment total)

Each message already has a unique ID, the Message-ID header. What you should do is find out how to make your web archiving software (pipermail) allow you to refer to a message by its Message ID. I don't know if this is possible, but it should be something that's relatively easy to add if it doesn't exist. Then it becomes a lot easier to add the footer because the Message ID is already part of the email's header, which exists before it's sent. Doing it any other way is really going to be an ugly hack, because the normal sequential numbering that the web archive uses goes by the order the messages were received, which might not be the same order they were generated.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:04 PM on August 25, 2006