URL to (locally stored) articles in mail/news

[Jaap-Henk Hoepman <hoepman@cs.utwente.nl>]

Many times I'd like to refer to some part of a mail message. For instance in my
todo lists or when I'm collecting material for a lecture or something.  So it
would be really nice to be able to refer to this with an URL like

gnus://localhost/200108241647.SAA03837@utrhcs.cs.utwente.nl#THE TENSIONBETWEEN "OPENNESS" AND "PRIVACY"

which happens to refer to today's article in NewsScan Daily. (X)Emacs should
highlight such an URL (even outside gnus) and when selecting this url, the
right mail message should be displayed (formatted as in gnus).

The scheme should be such that

* the URL does not break when moving articles from one folder to another
* if you delete the message locally, external databases could be searched to
  retrieve the mail
* you could mail the url to a friend and he should be able to retrieve
  the same mail.

The last two requirements imply that using the local message id as in the above
url is not good enough.

The closest thing gnus offers is fetching articles by message id
(gnus-summary-refer-article), but this really only works locally (for mail at
least), and only for the current mail group.

Does soemthing like this exist? Would it be hard to implement?

Jaap-Henk


-- 
Jaap-Henk Hoepman             | Come sail your ships around me
Dept. of Computer Science     | And burn your bridges down
University of Twente          |       Nick Cave - "Ship Song"
Email: hoepman@cs.utwente.nl === WWW: www.cs.utwente.nl/~hoepman
Phone: +31 53 4893795 === Secr: +31 53 4893770 === Fax: +31 53 4894590
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