Re: Repost: Time to revisit the message id generation algorithm?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

"Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson" <myrkraverk@gmx.com> writes:

> Reposting this here from gnu.emacs.gnus:

> There are two issues I have with the message id generation algorithm;
> the (message-unique-id) function.

> 1) It bleeds information.  This is an issue for those who use TOR or
> other anynomizers.

> 2) It may not be unique (anymore).

There is some discussion of the problems of generating message IDs at:

    http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-usefor-message-id-01

although it doesn't touch on the privacy issues.  The recommended
algorithm there is to use a message ID LHS generated from the local
timestamp with as much precision as possible, followed by some sort of
hopefully unique local data.  The suggestion in that draft that I like the
best (although it's a bit slow) is to take a hash of the message to get
the additional unique data, although using a pseudorandom number generator
isn't a bad idea.

One thing that I'd like to request, though, is that if this changes it
would be nice to have an option to keep the current message ID behavior or
something like it.  One of the really neat tricks that the current
behavior allows, provided that one isn't worried about the privacy issues,
is to automatically raise score on any message that is a reply to one of
your messages, since your messages are uniquely identifiable from the
message ID.  I use that technique *heavily*.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>