From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/50297 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Michael Shields Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: Why article numbers? Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 05:03:14 +0000 Organization: Mad Science Research Labs Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: <873cmf8u7h.fsf@mulligatwani.msrl.com> References: <841y2jzrgm.fsf@lucy.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: main.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1045976668 18002 80.91.224.249 (23 Feb 2003 05:04:28 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 05:04:28 +0000 (UTC) Return-path: Original-Received: from malifon.math.uh.edu ([129.7.128.13]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 18moJO-0004gE-00 for ; Sun, 23 Feb 2003 06:04:27 +0100 Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu ([129.7.128.10] ident=lists) by malifon.math.uh.edu with esmtp (Exim 3.20 #1) id 18moIX-000685-00; Sat, 22 Feb 2003 23:03:33 -0600 Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Sat, 22 Feb 2003 23:04:32 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (sclp3.sclp.com [66.230.238.2]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id XAA01265 for ; Sat, 22 Feb 2003 23:04:21 -0600 (CST) Original-Received: (qmail 22158 invoked by alias); 23 Feb 2003 05:03:17 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 22153 invoked from network); 23 Feb 2003 05:03:17 -0000 Original-Received: from challah.msrl.com (198.137.194.222) by 66.230.238.6 with SMTP; 23 Feb 2003 05:03:17 -0000 Original-Received: (qmail 28168 invoked from network); 23 Feb 2003 05:03:14 -0000 Original-Received: from localhost (HELO mulligatwani.msrl.com) (127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 23 Feb 2003 05:03:14 -0000 Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: (prj@po.cwru.edu's message of "Sat, 22 Feb 2003 16:43:37 -0500") Original-Lines: 32 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090016 (Oort Gnus v0.16) XEmacs/21.4 (Military Intelligence) Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:50297 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:50297 In article , prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) wrote: > I think I should point out that Kai and I seem to be advocating > slightly different things. Kai's suggestion, AIUI, is to use > Message-ID header fields as article IDs everywhere. One wrinkle with this is that it's possible for messages to have no message-ID. This never happens in news or with most MTAs, but it's legal in mail. One way it can happen is when using `G f' to read an mbox-format archive that has incomplete headers. It's also possible, and not uncommon, for the same mail message to be delivered twice -- because you receive it both directly and via a mailing list, or theoretically because an SMTP connection was dropped after the "." but before the acknowledgment. > My suggestion is > to let backends decide how to identify articles, with the only > requirement being that identifiers should be eq if they are supposed > to identify the same article. (This includes the possibility of > symbols whose names are Message-IDs, but does not require that.) That seems reasonable, especially sine it lets the conversion be done one backend at a time, or not at all for some backends. For mail with no message-ID, fake ones could be generated; I seem to remember VM doing this (with "@toto.iv"). I'm not sure what is the best way to handle duplicates. Message-IDs are fine identifiers for news. -- Shields.