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

Question

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 · Accepted Answer

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 · Answer

You&rsquo;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.