Ask HN: Would you want a way to share an email via URL from Gmail?

[ohvirginia]

I'm thinking about this as a way to publicly share an email thread. A future version could have you setting a password, or sharing only to a select group of people. But rather than "sending" an email, you turn an email into a link (like an archive), and then have that URL that you can reference. You could also create a list of multiple such links, to collect some archives together.

I'm just thinking email is so useful and ubiquitous, and the web and URLs are so useful, but there's not really a way to do this.

I know there are some where you can forward it to some place and then it becomes a web page. Someone this seems non ideal. But maybe I'm just imagining this. Maybe this is not useful for people at all.

Anyone want this?

[ColinWright]

There are many, many problems with the idea, so it would be useful if you could lay out:

* Why you think this would be useful ... can you give a specific use case that people here would identify with?

* What problems can you see, and how would you overcome them?

* How would it work? How could you make it effectively friction-free?

You say:

> I know there are some where you can forward it to some place and then it becomes a web page.

I've never seen or heard of such a thing ... can you explain why this "seems non-ideal"?

In short, I'd be interested to see your thinking.

[gregjor]

You’re describing a mailing lists and news groups.

If I want to share an email thread with specific people I can just forward the thread. If I want to publish it I would take the time to edit and format it, because an email thread gets messy really fast and full of repeated and irrelevant information.