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/