Thread: No easy way to join discussion in existing thread when not subscribed

The flat web interface does a reasonable job of letting people
follow discussion without getting too much mail. Once you find
a discussion you'd like to participate in though, there's no
easy way to make your first post to thread, because threading
is based on the "In-Reply-To:" or other some mail headers. If
you're not subscribed, you can't "Reply", and so your email
doesn't end up linked to the thread in the flat view (I'm
guessing most people use that, if not their mail client).

So far, I've been downloading the mbox, importing it to my mail client
and then replying and it's quite cumbersome.

I've read elsewhere that a possible solution is to provide a
mail address associated with a message (displayed on the web interface)
that routes your mail message to the thread. I'm not sure
if majordomo supports this, but if or another solution
is possible, it would be a welcome improvement.

Regards,
Amir

Amir Rohan <amir.rohan@mail.com> writes:
> I've read elsewhere that a possible solution is to provide a
> mail address associated with a message (displayed on the web interface)
> that routes your mail message to the thread.

Seems awfully like a here-please-spam-us button.  The address would have
to be displayed un-obfuscated, which means it'd get picked up by spammers'
webcrawlers.  Admittedly, no one would know except the PG list moderators,
but I think they'd be unhappy about an increase in workload.

And before you ask: yes, spammers still do that.  A lot.  For example,
just a few hours ago my mailserver bounced something

Sep 27 06:30:05 sss1 sendmail[29150]: t8RAU4Ja029150: <12716.1437746049@sss.pgh.pa.us>... User unknown

that certainly has never been used as a mail address, but it does match
a message-ID in the pgsql-hackers archives from July.  I see no plausible
explanation for that except that somebody scraped it off the archives and
took it for a deliverable address.  This is not an isolated example; I see
anywhere from a couple dozen to several hundred *per day* like this in my
mail logs.

There are ways around that, probably, but I'm not sure it's worth the
work.
        regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:
> Amir Rohan <amir.rohan@mail.com> writes:
> > I've read elsewhere that a possible solution is to provide a
> > mail address associated with a message (displayed on the web interface)
> > that routes your mail message to the thread.
> 
> Seems awfully like a here-please-spam-us button.

Yeah, that doesn't sound good.  What I think would be workable is to
create a feature that emails you an archived message, and requires that
you're logged in with your community account.  That sounds hard enough
to abuse by spammers and convenient enough for actual users.

I wonder if it would break stuff like DKIM signatures, SPF checks, and
the like.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 8:07 PM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> > > Amir Rohan <amir.rohan@mail.com> writes:
> > > > I've read elsewhere that a possible solution is to provide a
> > > > mail address associated with a message (displayed on the web interface)
> > > > that routes your mail message to the thread.
> > >
> > > Seems awfully like a here-please-spam-us button.
> >
> > Yeah, that doesn't sound good.  What I think would be workable is to
> > create a feature that emails you an archived message, and requires that
> > you're logged in with your community account.  That sounds hard enough
> > to abuse by spammers and convenient enough for actual users.
> >
> > I wonder if it would break stuff like DKIM signatures, SPF checks, and
> > the like.
> 
> It probably would -- but not more than just the mailinglist already does?

Yeah, good point ...

So how hard would you think this would be?

-- 
Álvaro Herrera                http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

<div style="font-family: Verdana;font-size: 12.0px;"><div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/27/2015 09:34 PM, Jeff Janes
wrote:</div><div><spanstyle="white-space: pre;">> On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Alvaro Herrera<br /> >
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com<mailto:alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>> wrote:<br /> ><br /> > Tom Lane wrote:<br
/>> > Amir Rohan <amir.rohan@mail.com <mailto:amir.rohan@mail.com>> writes:<br /> > > > I've
readelsewhere that a possible solution is to provide a<br /> > > > mail address associated with a message
(displayedon the web interface)<br /> > > > that routes your mail message to the thread.<br /> > ><br />
>> Seems awfully like a here-please-spam-us button.<br /> > </span><br /><br /> a captcha would be the usual
wayto solve that problem.<br /><br /><span style="white-space: pre;">> Yeah, that doesn't sound good. What I think
wouldbe workable is to<br /> > create a feature that emails you an archived message, and requires that<br /> >
you'relogged in with your community account. That sounds hard enough<br /> > to abuse by spammers and convenient
enoughfor actual users.<br /> ><br /> > I think majordomo already has a command to do that. It was discussed<br
/>> somewhere on one<br /> > of these lists in the last few months, but I can't seem to find the<br /> >
discussionnow.<br /> > </span><br /><br /><span style="white-space: pre;">> I thought someone was going to create
alink on the maillist archive<br /> > page that would provide some visibility to this buried gem.</span><br /><br />
Isn'tthere a ticket on the bug tracker? ;)<br /><br /><span style="white-space: pre;">> Maybe this vague
recollectioncan jog someone's memory.<br /> > </span><br /><br /> Not my memory, but my urge to read
documentation:<br/><br /> |To: majordomo@postgresql.org<br /><span style="white-space: pre;">|<br /> | approve
mypasswordarchive-get pgsql-www 20150927</span><br /><br /> Will get you the email(s), but:</div><div><br /> 1) You
needto subscribe first (and unsubsribe again later). Defeating the purpose.<br /> 2) Find out how to do this was not
trivialand took (relativly) a lot of time. Hiding instructions on this somewhere on the website wouldn't<br /> be much
betterin practice.<br /> 3) The selection granularity is crap. Asking for a day from -hackers<br /> got me 120 messages
tosift through. Majordomo offers alternative<br /> filters, but none is much better.<br /><br /> So as a user-facing
solution,it sucks, but if it helps to implement<br /> a click handler on the website that gets me a particular
message,</div><div>that'llwork.<br /><br /> Amir</div></div> 

* Amir Rohan (amir.rohan@mail.com) wrote:
> So far, I've been downloading the mbox, importing it to my mail client
> and then replying and it's quite cumbersome.

Is that cumbersome because the mbox is large, or is it the process?  If
it's the process, why not look into automating it?  If it's because the
mbox is large, then please join me in asking Magnus to add a
"download-as-mbox" link off of the 'flat' view, to get just one thread
as an mbox.

My hope is to convince Magnus to add that (or maybe I'll try and write
it myself..) and then have a macro in mutt which grabs the Message-ID of
the current message and pulls down the mbox and opens it.

Thanks!

Stephen

On 2015-09-28 08:44:18 -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> My hope is to convince Magnus to add that (or maybe I'll try and write
> it myself..) and then have a macro in mutt which grabs the Message-ID of
> the current message and pulls down the mbox and opens it.

Are mutt and the like users really the problematic audience here? I mean
it's trivial to add a reply-to header there?

Greetings,

Andres Freund

* Andres Freund (andres@anarazel.de) wrote:
> On 2015-09-28 08:44:18 -0400, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > My hope is to convince Magnus to add that (or maybe I'll try and write
> > it myself..) and then have a macro in mutt which grabs the Message-ID of
> > the current message and pulls down the mbox and opens it.
>
> Are mutt and the like users really the problematic audience here? I mean
> it's trivial to add a reply-to header there?

I didn't say they were and so I'm not sure what you're referring to
here.

In the part you cut out, Amir lamented on the difficulty of pulling down
and importing an mbox.  If part of the problem there is the size of the
monthly mbox (or that the mbox only contains part of the thread, which
can happen), then having the ability to pull down an mbox format of just
the thread would be helpful.  That's a capability which I'm also
interested in and which could be useful to a lot of people, regardless
of their mail client.

Thanks!

Stephen