[Barry Warsaw]
I really really want to use something like message-ids to generate message file names. I want to be able to generate links to archived messages in the footers, but I think the best way to do that is to agree on a reproducible, independent algorithm for calculating them.
What input parameters should such an algorithm have? I take it that you want to use just
- list name and
- message-id
and I think that would mostly work. However, the "mostly" part means that Mailman would need to implement some policy for dealing with posts that use an already-archived message-id. Some possible policies would be:
On message arrival, Mailman checks whether the archives already contains that message-id. If it does, the message is rejected, so the sender gets a chance to re-post the message with a fresh message-id.
Whenever Mailman receives a message whose message-id is already present in the archives, the original Message-Id: header is renamed to e.g. X-Original-Message-Id:, and Mailman generates a fresh (as in "not yet present in the archives") message-id before the message is either archived or sent to the list members.
Messages with duplicate message-ids are posted to the members as-is, but won't be archived.
-- Harald