For whatever it is worth, I share Lloyd's concern. The new setup is fine is one is trying to skim recent discussions on a mailing list and reasonably so to find a particular subject thread but I question its utility for references to particular messages, even references in later messages that one might want to trace back. For those purposes, it would be much better to have a URL that explicitly reflects the list name (WG lists seem to do that, but the IETF list doesn't) and a date or date range... or we should supply a DOI (and resolution mechanism) or appropriately-persistent URN. By the way, from a small semi-random sample, a large fraction of the links to WG mailing lists identified at https://datatracker.ietf.org/list/wg/ are dead. Is any effort being made to capture those discussions for historical purposes? Would it be worth explicitly identifying the useless links? As a non-random sample to illustrate the magnitude of the problem, I went through the links for WG names starting in "a" and exactly one of those that did not point to an IETF.ORG site is valid and one is clearly bogus (the domain-part of the URL is "www/"). So another question is "is anyone meaningfully responsible for that list?" best, john --On Sunday, March 20, 2016 11:42 +0000 lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > okay, I've finally belatedly noticed the new ietf mail archive. > (because I have a life these days.) > > Is e.g. > https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/GKYUQNOssvg-JIsPfj9 > 0_YI5r9w a permanent url? If not, should it be? > > (It's occasionally > useful to refer to emails directly, and cite text with urls, > but that doesn't look like a good choice. I mean, no date in > url? as a hint?)