[H-GEN] test

Greg Black gjb at humbug.org.au
Fri May 10 17:48:55 EDT 2002


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Jason Henry Parker wrote:

| Greg Black <gjb at humbug.org.au> writes:
| 
| [Sandra Milne's new mail client]
| > It generates bogus message-id headers.
| 
| What's wrong with the message-ID?

The following excerpt from RFC2822 might help to explain it:

   The message identifier (msg-id) itself MUST be a globally unique
   identifier for a message.  The generator of the message identifier
   MUST guarantee that the msg-id is unique.  There are several
   algorithms that can be used to accomplish this.  Since the msg-id has
   a similar syntax to angle-addr (identical except that comments and
   folding white space are not allowed), a good method is to put the
   domain name (or a domain literal IP address) of the host on which the
   message identifier was created on the right hand side of the "@", and
   put a combination of the current absolute date and time along with
   some other currently unique (perhaps sequential) identifier available
   on the system (for example, a process id number) on the left hand
   side.  Using a date on the left hand side and a domain name or domain
   literal on the right hand side makes it possible to guarantee
   uniqueness since no two hosts use the same domain name or IP address
   at the same time.  Though other algorithms will work, it is
   RECOMMENDED that the right hand side contain some domain identifier
   (either of the host itself or otherwise) such that the generator of
   the message identifier can guarantee the uniqueness of the left hand
   side within the scope of that domain.

The RHS of <MWMail.agibplmt at host.none> does not appear to me to
be in the spirit of the above paragraph.

| > It does not include a content-type header.
| 
| That's a feature, not a bug!

So why does your MUA include it?  :-)  In general, as suggested
by RFC2822, the provisions of RFC2045, RFC2046 and RFC2049
should be respected and that's where content-type and friends
are defined.

BTW, I'm not sure that we should start a major discussion in
this list about the correct interpretation of all those RFCs.

Greg

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