Reply to Mailman archived message

Question

I was having a problem with the GNU Debugger (GDB) and while the issue appears to be recurring, I found only one instance of someone recently experiencing the same problem. I found this other instance on a Mailman archived mailing list.

Then I tried some more things and finally solved the issue with GDB. So, now I want to report back the solution I found to the mailing list. However, this is really only of use if Mailman recognizes my mail as being the same thread as the original problem, but I do not have that mail (just the online archived version of it) so I cannot reply to it.

How can I make sure Mailman considers my mail as a reply to that thread?

Is simply copying the topic enough?

Answer 1

For one thing, even if you do reply to that old message, Mailman will still show your email in the month it was sent. So it's probably not worth the hassle to try replying to a message you don't have. Just send a new email out to the mailing list with your solution (assuming it is topically relevant).

However, for educational purposes: copying the subject won't be enough, because not every message on a mailing list can be expected to have a unique subject. The standard way to indicate that you're replying to a message is through the email header In-Reply-To. The value of that header is taken from the Message-ID header of the message you're replying to. Normally this is done automatically by your email client, but if you use a program that allows you to set custom header fields, you should be able to do it manually. If you go to the list archives of the mailing list in question and click on the "Gzip'd text" link for the month in question, you should get a gzipped text file that includes the Message-ID headers for each email sent that month. Copy the value of the header from the message you're trying to reply to, and add a custom In-Reply-To header with that value to the message you're sending. For instance, if you see

Message-ID: [email protected]

in the message you're replying to in the downloaded text file, you should add the custom header

In-Reply-To: [email protected]

to the message you're sending, and your message will then be considered a reply to the old message.

Answer 2

According to http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/fourthgrademath/2009-September/000337.html

Notice, on the archived message, there's a link for [the author's] spam-safe email address? That link is actually an HTML mailto link. Clicking it will create a new message to the list with a matching subject line.

Answer 3

Get the Message-Id from the page source

Besides downloading the month archives as mentioned at https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/23198/51862 you can also find the Message-Id by inspecting the page source.

At the top of every message page, e.g. http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2018-March/214868.html there is a mailto: link that shows as:

Ciro Santilli ciro.santilli at gmail.com

If you just click on it on Chromium 64, Ubuntu 17.10, it does not work: Thunderbird opens up, without the In-Reply-To. Same behaviour for all combinations of Firefox 58 and setting gmail as my email handler that I've tried.

However, if you open the page source, or use the Inspect browser feature (Ctrl + Shift + I), we can see that the full link is actually:

mailto:buildroot%40busybox.net?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BBuildroot%5D%20%5BPATCH%5D%20Fix%20%22Incorrect%20selection%20of%20kernel%20headers%3A%0A%20expected%204.11.x%2C%20got%204.15.x%22%20for%20qemu_x86_64_defconfig&In-Reply-To=%3C20180303072704.11166-1-ciro.santilli%40gmail.com%3E

and so the In-Reply-To is actually there but URL encoded! We can then use a decoder such as: https://urldecode.org or CLI tools which gives us the correct Message-Id:

<[email protected]>

Manually set the In-Reply-To header to the Message-Id we found

Once we have the message ID, we now need to find a client that allows us to set it.

Methods that I've tested on my gmail account:

• mutt

  First ensure that mutt is configured correctly, and that you can send emails across two dummy accounts you control.

  Then add to your .muttrc:

  set edit_headers=yes
  

  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12158201/how-to-change-the-senders-name-or-e-mail-address-in-mutt

  When editing the email on the text editor, you can now see the headers and edit them directly, so we should make them contain a line of type:

  In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
  

  The Subject: field should match what the OP set, but you don't need to put the mailing list tag [gem5-users] on the Subject: line, this gets added automatically when GNU Mailman forwards emails to people.

  Here is a sample reply that I entered completely manually through this method: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg15488.html (also worked on the GNU Mailman of the project, but it unfortunately logging in to see: http://m5sim.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/gem5-users/2018-May/031515.html )

  One easy way to find a template for the reply headers is to click to reply to a thread that you received after subscribing, and just modify the Subject: and In-Reply-To: fields to what you need.

  Beware however that corporate firewall might block mutt's ports while not blocking gmail's web interface: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28038662/how-to-solve-unable-to-initialize-smtp-properly-when-using-using-git-send-ema/50172911#50172911

  Tested in GNU Mailman 2.1.16, mutt 1.9.4, Ubuntu 18.04.

I could not find a good method for the following clients:

• gmail: Is there any way to modify the mail headers in an outgoing message sent using Gmail?
• Thunderbird: https://superuser.com/questions/1177870/manually-set-in-reply-to-header-in-thunderbird

Standards

The RFC itself mentions that In-Reply-To in mailto links https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1738 :

An interesting use of your mailto URL is when browsing archives of messages. Each browsed message might contain a mailto URL like:

<mailto:foo[email protected]?In-Reply-
To=%[email protected]>

and it is great that GNU Mailman devs took advantage of it, but I wonder which component is not working properly to make this just work.

Confusingly, the same RFC also says:

4. Unsafe headers

The user agent interpreting a mailto URL SHOULD choose not to create a message if any of the headers are considered dangerous; it may also choose to create a message with only a subset of the headers given in the URL. Only the Subject, Keywords, and Body headers are believed to be both safe and useful.

The creator of a mailto URL cannot expect the resolver of a URL to understand more than the "subject" and "body" headers. Clients that resolve mailto URLs into mail messages should be able to correctly create RFC 822-compliant mail messages using the "subject" and "body" headers.

so maybe that's why many clients don't support it?

See also: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4782068/can-i-set-subject-content-of-email-using-mailto/41365892#41365892

The next thing you will want to know is how to apply patch sets other people have sent to test them locally: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5062389/getting-started-with-git-am Spoiler: it is a pain / undoable as well.

Answer 4

I was trying to answer to that message:

https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2016-04/msg00165.html

@david-z answer's helped me to understand what happens behind the scenes, but what really worked for me was going to the mailing list archive:

https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/

And downloading the compressed mbox (a .mbox file) of the mailing list archive for April 2016. Then, I imported the downloaded mbox file to Mozilla Thunderbird following these instructions:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_folders

Finally, I searched for that message and clicked on Reply to All, as suggested here:

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/419363-how-do-you-reply-to-a-mailing-list-message

It seems that after writing my reply and clicking on Send, my reply was actually sent to the mailing list.

Answer 5

If you can download mbox file (it's in patchwork instances, if you weren't subscribed in the past) you can get it from there. Easiest to reply to that thread is mutt -f file.mbox or load this mbox file with c in mutt.