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Re: mutt ignores certain message-ID's?



On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 02:45:10PM -0500, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 18 at 06:06 PM, quoth Vincent van Leeuwen:
> >All the messages have Message-ID's and References or In-Reply-To 
> >headers which all seem to be correct. However, the Message-ID's from 
> >person B do look a bit odd:
> >
> >Message-ID: <000001c88053$c54232f0$4fc698d0$@helder@example.com>
> 
> Technically, it's not just odd, but an invalid message-id. Message-IDs 
> may only have a single @ symbol in them. What email client generated 
> that?
> 

X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0

Surprise surprise.

> >Can it be that Mutt doesn't recognise that Message-ID as a real one 
> >and ignores it for threading purposes?
> 
> That's exactly correct. Mutt holds invalid message-id's in dim regard, 
> because they're so much more likely to be forgeries. Several mail 
> clients do bad things in this regard, including using email addresses 
> as the "message-id". Mutt does some gymnastics to try and accept as 
> many weird variants of message-id's as it can, but there's a limit, 
> and you've found one: mutt explicitly ignores so-called message-ids 
> that have more than one @ symbol. So when parsing the References 
> header, this message-id is ignored.
> 
> Part of the reason for this is the philosophy "be conservative in what 
> you send, liberal in what you accept." Mutt is trying to avoid putting 
> invalid message-id's in the "References" header of email that it 
> sends.
> 

Oh I hadn't realized the part about reusing it in a references header, that's 
definitely a good reason to ignore it.

> >If so, is there anything I can do (except editing the messages by 
> >hand ofcourse) to make Mutt thread them properly again?
> 
> It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you want mutt to 
> display the threads properly, then editing them by hand (or feeding 
> them to a script) to alter the Message-ID into something that is 
> valid, and then using the & key to force generate the References 
> header in the reply is probably the only solution.
> 
> If you want mutt to ignore the fact that the message-id is invalid, 
> you can edit mutt's source, but I don't recommend that.
> 

Yeah, I'm not the only user using that binary on that server so I'll refrain 
from doing that ;) I already have a procmail+formail script to add missing 
message-ID's, seems like I'll need another one to correct this scenario. I'll 
have to think a bit on that one as it will produce References and I-R-T 
headers that make no sense. Although I guess I shouldn't be too nice to people 
who use mailclients who largely ignore those headers and produce invalid 
Message-ID's :)

Thanks for the help and the prompt reply!


Regards,

Vincent van Leeuwen
Media Design - http://www.mediadesign.nl/