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

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

"Jason R. Mastaler" <jason@mastaler.com> writes:
> Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:
> > No, if one user is named `Xfoo' and the user agent does
> > time+uid+name, then you might get a clash with a user named `foo'
> > and a user agent which does time+uid+Xname.
> 
> But remember that gnus also adds a `.fsf' to the lhs.

A different algorithm might happen to append that same string,
possibly as part of its randomness.  There's no standard (AFAIK) for
user agents to avoid stepping on each others' toes here, so there's no
way for Gnus to generate a Message-ID that it know will never be
produced by a different agent.

"But this means the uniqueness problem is intractable!" you may say,
and you'd be right: to absolutely guarantee uniqueness, we'd need
either a single facility for generating Message-IDs systemwide, or a
standard to keep the different generators out of each others' way.  We
don't have those, so we don't have a perfect solution.  But we do have
a solution that, while imperfect, is not too bad, and we can avoid
making it worse.


paul