Re: Threads and &
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On Friday, June 19 at 02:43 PM, quoth Rocco Rutte:
> Hmm, I think the reason is rather that nobody thought of this case.
> A problem with assigning it a locally generated Message-ID is that
> it's locally generated, i.e. nobody else that. If this is, for
> example, a mailing list message, and you assign a new one, you'll
> break everybody else's References because they don't know you
> generated an ID for it.
That's true, but...
> Anyway, shouldn't the first MTA in the mail path that sees a message
> without an ID assign one?
Nope. Message-ID is an optional field, according to RFC 822. Some MTAs
*do* add Message-IDs to messages, but they're not required to and so
not all of them do. More recently RFC 2822 says all messages *should*
have a Message-ID field, but doesn't explicitly encourage MTAs to add
one to messages that don't have one. Because of this, I think an
argument similar to the one you made above could be made against MTAs
adding Message-ID headers: they can only add a locally generated
header, and cannot guarantee that every recipient of the message will
receive that Message-ID header with that message.
As an example, qmail will only add a Message-ID header if the message
is added to the queue via qmail-inject (i.e. if its almost certainly a
new message). If the message comes in via SMTP, qmail does not add a
Message-ID header (after all, when coming in via SMTP, it's not
necessarily likely that this is the entire list of recipients of the
message).
As an example of a message that got distributed to the mutt list
without a Message-ID header, check out the one from Dave Feustel on
April 6th (Subject: "Use gvim with mutt to compose email"). It's
missing a Message-ID header AND a Date header (and the latter isn't
even technically optional, it's *required*). Of course, if you use
sendmail or some other MTA, it will have added those headers locally
(if it was generated locally, you'll probably notice that the
Message-ID has your own hostname in it, rather than Dave's sending
hostname). For example, the MARC archives added their own header;
notice that http://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=123903727123112&w=2 shows
a Message-ID that was added by mailer.progressive-comp.com, which is
one of their own servers.
In any case, if MTAs are "allowed" to add Message-IDs to messages even
if the message did not originate locally, then why can't mutt do the
same? It's true that, if we then reply to that message, nobody will
recognize the referenced message-id, but so what? I don't see how that
would have any major drawbacks compared to refusing to generate a
local message-id.
~Kyle
- --
I couldn't give you something mediocre even if that's all you asked
for.
-- Michelangelo, in The Agony and the Ecstasy
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