In an number of discussion boards people have suggested reading "page 40" to find some information. That doesn't work except at the moment of posting and even then only for someone with the same number of messages per page as the poster. Another mistake of referral (and one that I've been making myself) is to use the timestamp of the message, but that's no good for anyone in a different timezone.

Hence, could there be a way to reference an earlier message or even better to be able to make a link to it?

One possible implementation is to display a Message Id (perhaps to the right of the Delete link) for textual references, eg "See message 9356". For the linking part of the request each message could be given a named anchor and the displayed Message Id could be a link to that anchor. This would have two benefits: firstly it could be 'Copy shortcut'ed for referencing elsewhere, and secondly, clicking on it would put that message at the top of the window.