I read a lot of mailing lists, including the voluminous public-html. When reading mailing list mail, I often find myself wanting a URL to the current post in the mailing list's archives. Fortunately, RFC 5064 defines the Archived-At header for precisely this purpose, and lots of mailing list software provide it in their mail.

Back when I used Gnus+Gmane for following technical mailing lists, I wrote some elisp to make Archived-At more useful to me. But it’s 2009 and I’ve been using Gmail almost exclusively for several years. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't expose any UI around Archived-At, nor can JavaScript get at the full mail headers—at least, not without clicking through to the “Show Original” screen.

So I’ve made a bookmarklet that, when invoked on a Gmail “Show Original” screen, redirects your browser to the URL in Archive-At: follow Archived-At header. I’ve put a quick demo of the bookmarklet on Flickr.

Share and Enjoy!