This is a rather trivial solution to the problem; I wouldn't have raised this question at all if all the documents we pass around are available at publicly accessible URLs. I was referring to documents which are not on the Web.
What do you suggest we do then?
Put those documents on the web !! Get yourself a free account at geocities/tripod and put your documents there. Your documents will then be available for eternity ... or for whatever time your account is active :P
This is more trouble than I would be willing to take just to let some members of my mailing list see an interesting document I've found. But if the rest of you think this is the way to go, I'm fine with it. I'll just never make such documents available to the list, that's all. No big deal.
There are people (...though in minority) who search the archives ... do you know how html messages look in archives ? take a look: http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/search/linuxers
I looked, and I can see those dirty HTML tags. Bloody irritating.
I'm going a bit off-topic here, but perhaps the mail archiving software is the problem here? I have seen archives maintained by Hypermail, and I haven't seen any such problems in its handling MIME encapsulated messages. In fact, Hypermail does an excellent job with opaque attachments (e.g. Word docs or audio files or whatever) too; it just gives you a link using which you can download the attachment.
Similarly, I have heard a lot of comments during this discussion about the difficulty of using HTML messages using plain-text mail clients like Pine. While this is a bit of a problem sometimes (HTML with frames), I usually find my Pine client (I use Pine exclusively, nothing else, and this is the stock version bundled with SuSE 8.1) displays HTML just fine, without actually launching any "helper app" or asking me to jump through any hoops. So, is HTML content really such a problem even today with Pine?
I know both these comments are a bit off-topic, but I thought I'd ask anyway. :)
Shuvam