Re: MessageID's again... from Kent Landfield on 1999-10-04 (Hypermail Development List)

From: Kent Landfield <kent_at_hypermail-project.org>
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 16:53:55 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <199910042153.QAA01854_at_rkive.landfield.com>

# When I went back and checked on the archive, sure enough. These
# messages have identical MessageID's on them in the headers, BUT, the
# messages are different. They're not duplicates. So, a) how in the
# world can one get email with identical MessageID's in the header
# (spanned across several days sometimes), and b) how in the world to
# solve this problem now?

Was it obvious from the other message headers that they came from the same site ? Or did a memory problem mess up a mailer and a software glitch occur ?

You will not be able to solve the problem for the world. There are just too many screwed up MTA implementations and misconfigured mail servers. You'll have to make the decision for your site. What do you require locally ? Using the .hmrc directive

discard_dup_msgids = 0

hypermail will not discard messages duplicate msg-id: headers. By default it does. The only way hypermail could fix it would be to basically 'diff' the two messages when a duplicate is encountered. That's a good deal of overhead that would slow things down with large archives.

When I've encountered misconfigured mail software I have sent a message to the site admin of the offending site. That has helped a couple get things corrected but...

Probably not the answer you were looking for. :)

-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502             
Email: kent_at_landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
Email: kent_at_nfr.net                   http://www.nfr.net/
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Received on Mon 04 Oct 1999 11:55:14 PM GMT

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