Duplicate message ids

From: Paul Haldane <Paul.Haldane_at_newcastle.ac.uk_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Tue, 4 May 1999 19:59:29 +0100 (GMT)
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95-960729.990504195238.24629E-100000_at_carr6.ncl.ac.uk>

Any more thoughts on what (if anything) we should do with messages with duplicate message ids?

My inclination is to stick with what we do now - don't try to add the duplicates to the web archive but put out a warning message to that a human can fix things by hand.

The alternative (other than rejigging HM's internal data structures) would be for HM to assign a new message id to the problem message. This would probably be quite easy.

Depends why we're doing it - to keep HM happy because its internal structures can't cope with dup msgids or to protect the server running hypermail against the effects of mail loops which sometimes show up as lots of messages with the same id.

Paul

> Duplicate message-ids _shouldn't_ be a problem - after all message-ids are
> meant to be unique - in the real world of course, we know that they
> sometimes aren't - I had to put special case code in the loop detection
> code of the MLM I was maintaining to not do duplicate msgid checks if the
> msgid ended _at_MAPI.to.RFC822 :-<. There was also a version of pine that
> generated duplicates under some circumstances (same machine, day, minute,
> second, different hour? - something like that).
>
> Hypermail shouldn't drop messages on the floor without letting the user
> know.
>
> It may be problematic with the current structure of Hypermail to cope with
> different messages with the same msgid. I think quite a lot of it assumes
> that there's a 1-1 mapping between msgid and message.
Received on Tue 04 May 1999 09:16:17 PM GMT