Ask HN: URLs for emails | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: URLs for emails

12 pointsadelevie12 comments

Is there any way to create a URL for an email?

This would be very useful for work groups, ie:

>I finished feature #12 per Bob Smith's email (http://gmail.com/bobsmith/emails/12345)

Of course this would need a robust auth/permissions system.

Has anything like this been done? If not, why?

Internally an email server uses directories like Windows or Linux. There is nothing really unique about directories. Externally though it works in a different manner.

The "http" protocol is an internet standard that is set aside for a specific purpose that does not include email. You could probably modify an email server to allow posting the messages in an email mailbox to an apache web server directory to be able to use the "http" protocol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol

Email has its own set of standards about how it works so that one email server can talk to other email servers and the DNS system. The http protocol is not part of this. So it seems like the email would need to be sent via standard email protocols and then moved to an Apache webserver directory as a copy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address

Email is pretty simple, if I were doing it I would set up an email server and an apache server on Centos5x and play with it. You can probably make it happen.

Postfix/Dovecot is a popular email combo.

Wouldn't a modern email server use a database and not a file system with directories?

There is no reason it could not use a database, but not that I know of. The email messages end up in a directory in plain text. So for instance if you are running MS Server 2003 with the MS email server setup, the system admin (with the proper permissions) can go in and read your emails with notepad. Same goes for Linux email servers. Maybe Gmail (or another huge service provider) uses a database on the backend, but as far as I know email is just directories and text files.

Even if it does write to a database, assuming that you can programmatically access it, you could build something that works with apache (or runs its own webserver) to translate URLs into doing database lookups.

If you were to actually go about doing this (regardless of whether it is text files or a database), you'd also want to automatically include the URLs within the emails themselves, which I would think many mail servers would let you do.

This is exceptionally rare, and no major email server does this.

File systems are reliable, easily scaled and distributed and backed up. :-)

It looks like ccing messages to Google Groups would work.

Example:

http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news/browse_t...

I also checked a closed group that I belong to and verified that you can use a link there as well but it requires that you log in with an account that has access before you can read it.

Basecamp lets you link to messages, comments on messages, to-do items, etc. It has a robust per-project auth/permissions system. Other collaboration sites offer something similar.

In general, when dealing with work that occurs via emails, it seems like it's easier to build a separate system that has email notifications, versus trying to glue features onto email.

Gmail at least used to support sharing email URLs among the sender and recipients of an email, so long as they had Gmail accounts. (Nobody else could see them, naturally.) Useful for "...When did you send me that email?" "It's this email, <plink>."

I haven't tried it in awhile, though.

Update: Doesn't work, anymore. Sad.

It would be interesting to make a service where you forwarded your email to somename@yournewapp.com and it replied with a link to that email so that you could easily share it.

I haven't done my google homework. I wouldn't be surprised if it already exists.

You could always use code pasting web sites as a quick fix.

Why wouldn't you simply forward the email to the people you want to share it with?

To refer to it outside of an email application.

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