Bob Bellizzi wrote:

To make it possible, it would be helpful to have a special email
"command" that calls to have a specific message returned to the
"caller" regardless of their email setup definition (no email, special
notices, digest, individual, whatever), the message would be emailed
to them after they initiated the call.

and later:

e.g. xyzgroup+call@groups.io (with a subject of )14587

Call seems a bit obscure. How about +retrieve ? Or even +GetMessage ?

Either way, it sounds like the email-command equivalent of the web Send-to-me feature I proposed once long ago.
https://beta.groups.io/g/main/topic/2195268

In your use case it seems like you'd want the ability to call a message that was posted before you joined the group; that seems a fairly likely case when a "mentor" is directing you to a prior message. That would break a protection I suggested back then.

So it re-opens the question of whether there needs to be any protection against having a new(ish) group member collect all of the group's history by calling for the messages sequentially. For my groups I'd rather have the feature than not, so I hope there's an answer that Mark will be comfortable with implementing.

Shal