I stumbled across a way to retrieve (some, if not all) broken JISCmail
links.
Recall that the archive used to be presented on a month-by-month basis.
The web addresses for individual posts had a code reflecting year and
month.
Then, because there were too many months, the listing method was switched
to years. If someone in an old posting linked to another post under the
previous coding, that link is now broken.
There appears to be a way to retrieve at least some of these links, which
I'll illustrate with an example.
The link
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0310&L=spm&D=0&I=-1&P=4180
is in the old format, because of the "0310" coding. It no longer works.
We can tell JISCmail to present a listing for that month:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A1=ind0310&L=spm
To find the link we're looking for, use your web browser to view the HTML
source for this page and search for
4180
(I'm sitting in front of IE 6.0, and I use the menus View == Source.)
It's easy to look at the HTML code and see the precise date and time:
Mon, 6 Oct 2003 12:24:02 +0200
Then go back to the current page listing all posts for 2003, and search
for this date. In this particular example, we find
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind03&L=spm&P=374372
(I stripped out some attributes from this URL that just tell JISCmail who
I am.)
This method doesn't work for a link like
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0403&L=spm&P=R23032&I=-1
where the value ("R23032") for the attribute "P" has an "R" prefix.
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