Subject: Question on Use Case: Choosing atom:content's type when Archiving Mailing Lists

From: Andreas Sewe <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:19:56 -0600

I have a question regarding a specific Atom use case: What is 
the preferred way to set up an Atom feed listing the contents of 
a mailing list's archive, given that composite media types (in 
particular "message/rfc822") are disallowed for atom:content's 
type attribute? This prevents me from doing something like the 
following, serving the archived mails "as-is" via HTTP:

<atom:content type="message/rfc822" 
src="http://www.example.org/lists/list/archive/12345"/>

But then again there might be something more fundamentally wrong 
with serving mails as "message/rfc822" via HTTP than I currently 
realize -- and I should better serve the mails as "text/plain" 
or convert them to HTML first (which is the way the atom-syntax 
archive works).

Nevertheless, any advice on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Andreas Sewe

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:32:00 +0900

Hello Andreas,

There was quite some discussion between Keith Moore and me
and a few others about how to serve email in the context of
draft-duerst-archived-at-XX.

See e.g. http://www.imc.org/ietf-822/mail-archive/msg05486.html
and many older threads in the same archive.

The general idea seems to be that conversion to HTML is good for
human consumption with a browser, and for human navigation in an
archive. message/rfc822 is the original, and may be very good for
reuse in a mailer (e.g. for replying), except that mailers don't
support it much at the moment.

looks perfectly okay to me if that's what you want to do.
The average atom software may have difficulties treating
the message in a good way, but special applications could
do very interesting things with it. If the spec prohibits
it, that should maybe be fixed in the long term. To show
that there are good uses for it, and working implementations,
is the best start in that direction.

Regards,    Martin.

At 10:19 05/06/09, Andreas Sewe wrote:
 >
 >I have a question regarding a specific Atom use case: What is the 
preferred way to set up an Atom feed listing the contents of a mailing 
list's archive, given that composite media types (in particular 
"message/rfc822") are disallowed for atom:content's type attribute? This 
prevents me from doing something like the following, serving the archived 
 >
 >But then again there might be something more fundamentally wrong with 
serving mails as "message/rfc822" via HTTP than I currently realize -- and 
I should better serve the mails as "text/plain" or convert them to HTML 
first (which is the way the atom-syntax archive works).