> After a archive-worthy discussion in email, you forward the thread to "archivebot@my-company-domain.com". The script will parse the email chain and generate a static web page hosted on a local server.
Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread", at least not currently. If you hit the forward button in your email client it will only forward the last email in the thread, which sometimes contains the entire thread as quoted reply text, but only in situations where each person has only replied to the most recent email in the thread. Some email clients also truncated the quoted reply text after a certain number of messages, and it's not generally parsable.
Our email archival product uses a G Suite add-on for this reason, which provides the same benefits as OAuth but works on a thread-by-thread basis. I think Outlook extensions work the same way, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
Actually technically Gmail does have a little known "forward thread" button that's hidden in one of the dropdowns, but it doesn't work that well. (Which you'll see if you try it on any longer thread.)
> Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread"
Mailing lists have for years offered mailing list archives that you can read directly in your client, exactly as if the messages had been hitting your inbox from the beginning. The bigger problem with email is that messages are not as easily addressable, unlike links on the Web.
> The bigger problem with email is that messages are not as easily addressable, unlike links on the Web.
You can format email messages for display on the web and generate permalinks for each message. E.g. look at what we do for https://www.prettyfwd.com. I haven't yet added a JS snippet to autoscroll to a specific message if you pass it in the UUID for that message as a URL parameter, but it's been on my TODO list for a while.
The other problem with most mailing list archives is that they look terrible and have poor readability, poor SEO, and generally terrible lighthouse scores. Whereas I think we score perfect 100s across the board, albeit only 99 on mobile perf because we don't prerender.
Unfortunately there isn't any such thing as "forwarding an email thread", at least not currently. If you hit the forward button in your email client it will only forward the last email in the thread, which sometimes contains the entire thread as quoted reply text, but only in situations where each person has only replied to the most recent email in the thread. Some email clients also truncated the quoted reply text after a certain number of messages, and it's not generally parsable.
Our email archival product uses a G Suite add-on for this reason, which provides the same benefits as OAuth but works on a thread-by-thread basis. I think Outlook extensions work the same way, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
Actually technically Gmail does have a little known "forward thread" button that's hidden in one of the dropdowns, but it doesn't work that well. (Which you'll see if you try it on any longer thread.)