Marking up mail

Marking up email on the Web is not a pretty picture in 2008.

• Weaver daemon used by Gmane (seems complicated to setup)
• Hypermail (51k SLOC) used at suckless
• Hypermess (56k SLOC C) used by the W3C
• Mailman’s Pipermail used for Python mail archives (not a drop in replacement for hypermail or maintained according to upstream)
• MHonArc (280k SLOC of perl) used by Debian lists
• lurker (10k+ CPP) used by the free network group
• zest 1k of Python (looks like an interesting research project which I have not managed to get working yet…)

Notable mail archiving services:

• Google Groups for Usenet archives and much more, with a killer search feature
• The Mail Archive which uses MHonArc

Random thoughts:

• I think the thread view is the most important feature. Google’s approach to threading mail as a bunched up conversation works quite well, though I still prefer the tree threaded structure that mutt does so well.
• Mailman implements RFC2369, though the W3C doesn’t seem to support this, though it does use Archived-At: which is quite useful. Google doesn’t seem to employ archive links to HTML sadly.
• I am not fond of framed views that I’ve seen some mail archiving services provide.
• Has anyone really studied how a RFC2822 mail message should be marked up in HTML? 3.1. Formats of Archived Message does not address the problem.

Any other relevant RFCs, tools or tips I might have missed?