Re: Feature request: Support for body in mailto links

[Siddh Raman Pant <code@siddh.me>]

On Thu, 22 Dec 2022 02:34:19 +0530, Eric Wong, wrote:
> Siddh Raman Pant code@siddh.me> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > It would be nice if mailto links also contained the body of the
> > email one is replying to in quoted form (i.e. have leading "> ")
> > so that one can directly start replying when the client opens. It
> > seems the "body" hname allows this behaviour.
>
> How many mail clients does it work on? And do people even use
> mailto: links?

I tried it on mutt, Thunderbird, GMail web and mobile, Outlook web,
and Samsung's mobile mail app. So it does seem to have wide support.

If mailto is unused, why would the option and its support be there
in this project, and also in proprietary clients on mobile and web?

Debbugs also has the behaviour I mentioned, you may try it on any of
their bug report email pages. For example:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1018118
(I know it's not exactly an archival project like this.)

> It would roughly double the the size of HTML
> responses for /$INBOX/$MSGID/ endpoints and probably increase
> browser memory use a similar amount.

That makes sense, thanks.

While I can't say much about performance in general (I am not much
familiar with the project internals, and came across this due to
lore.kernel.org), but regarding browser memory, the threaded view
already shows multiple messages, so I don't think it would be too
much of an issue, and the mailto links are apparently only shown
when you open permalinks.

I just tried loading on w3m an 896 KB HTML thread from lore.kernel.org
(containing 2-3 kernel configs, which you'd agree is normally huge
spam), and w3m seems to take 33MB of memory, a normal amount.

> Fwiw, I'm not a fan of quoting publicly-archived mail;
> especially with our "archives first" philosophy.
> 
> Quotes makes messages significantly bigger than they need to be;
> thus more expensive to mirror when the replied message is
> readily accessible in public archives.  I end up skipping over
> quotes 99% of the time.

Isn't quoting when replying to the convention? And most mailing lists
I have seen use quoting...

Thanks,
Siddh