Permalinks that can be computed on client side

[kohsuke]

First of all, thank you for this great service. Nabble has been invaluable to me.

Now, here's my feature request.

One of the things I like about Nabble is the easy-to-discover permalinks to messages. I use this all the time, so that I can refer to an e-mail discussion in other contexts. For example, I often put a nabble URL in my Subversion commit message so that I can later come back to a particular change and see the relevant discussion. I often put a nabble URL in an issue tracker to cross-link bugs and discussions. Or when I'm writing to someone else about a discussion happened elsewhere, I often put a nabble URL instead of forwarding messages, so that the recipients can see follow-ups.

Now, the thing about these use cases is that I need to figure out Nabble permalink URLs, and I need do so from my primary mail user agent programs (which is in my case, Thunderbird), not from nabble web site. Ideally what I'd like to see is that Thunderbird has a "Nabble permalink" hyperlink, just like it has a hyperlink for sender and recipients for each e-mail, so that I can quickly copy it from Thunderbird and paste it elsewhere. In contrast, today, for me to figure out a permalink URL, I have to come to nabble website and perform a search to find the e-mail,which I've already opened in my Thunderbird right in front of me. This wastes my time.

So to this end, I'd like to propose that Nabble offers permalink URLs based on a few key properties of e-mail that any MUA can get without talking to Nabble.  Sender, Subject, Date, Message-Id, and Mailing-List headers would do. So the permalink could look something like:

   http://www.nabble.com/permalink?sender=...&subject=...&date=...&message-id=...

Or if this URL feels too long, it could be a reasonable hash of those combined values, in which case the URL could be something like:

   http://www.nabble.com/permalink?abcdedBase64EncodedSha1HashCode1234567

I think the key is not to require talking to the server when computing a permalink, or else my MUA would end up sending too much information to Nabble. That is, I'd like to see "Nabble permalink" hyperlink on every e-mail, but I don't want my MUA to eagerly send this much information to the server every time I open a message.

I suppose alternatively you can design UI so that you compute the permalink only after I request a link, in which case the action will have to be a button or a menu item. And I'd have to wait for an HTTP request round-trip, and for the browser-based MUA like GMail, this means a page transition.

Now, once Nabble offers something like this, the community could pitch in about writing MUA connectivity.  For example, I'd imagine writing Thunderbird extension to show such a permalink should be straight-forward (modulo hashing.) For GMail one might write a greasemonkey script to do it.

In conclusion, the whole point of having permalinks is to be used in other contexts, so it's essential that permalinks are easy to discover. I think this enhancement will be a significant improvement in this direction.

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Kohsuke Kawaguchi

[Cordilow]

This is something I've posted about before.  Haven't they added this to the mail subject or something?  It seems like there is a permalink now (it's been a small while since I've had Thunderbird set up for my feeds; I'll have to do that soon), however, the link might not be obvious; look around your subject and such; I think it's there (or at least the forum link; I'm not sure which it is).  Tell me if I'm wrong.  Maybe I misunderstood your issue.