Re: `user-mail-address' for message-ids

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

"Jason R. Mastaler" <jason@mastaler.com> writes:
> prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc) writes:
> > Why do you care whether it matches the From address?
> 
> Any number of reasons Paul, try using your imagination.  Aesthetics,
> to conceal the (system-name) of one's machine, etc..

Functionality trumps aesthetics.  If you want anonymity, use an
anonymous remailer.  (Message-ID isn't the only place your hostname
would show up in the header.)

> > Message-ID is not meant for human consumption, so you shouldn't care
> > if it's ugly.  
> 
> Fiddlesticks.  Message-IDs are referenced all the time by us humans.

But their primary purpose is to be a universally unique identifier for
messages.  Using the domain from user-mail-address would subvert that
purpose.

> > If two Message-IDs are generated on different hosts, but they use
> > the same fqdn, they might come out identical.  That would be bad.
> 
> I'm not advocating anything new here, just a re-order within
> `message-make-fqdn'.

But that *is* something new.  It would make collisions significantly
more likely.  With collisions, we get problems like:
- News messages would get rejected for no good reason.
- Threaded mailing list archives would break.
- Threading in general would break.

> In fact, machines whose (system-name) returns just "hostname"
> instead of "hostname.domain.dom" such on Solaris will end up using
> `user-mail-address' for the message-id anyway.

Yes, but that's just a last resort.  Message-ID is intended to
uniquely identify a single message in all the world, for all time.
It's clearly not feasible for all hosts to collaborate when generating
Message-IDs, so to make collisions as unlikely as possible, we need a
unique identification of the host generating the Message-ID in the
Message-ID.  Do you think having a unique identifier is not
worthwhile?

> I'm simply requesting this behavior for all machines.  Or, at least
> the option to choose it.

You already know how to make this change for your own Gnus.  Why do
you want to break mine?


paul