John A. Martin writes:
>> better to go ahead and use the mesage-id, rather than concoct >> yet another "this time we mean it!" unique identifier. st> That's not the point. We're not going to impose this on st> senders;
I read the quote as meaning "this time we mean it really is unique", imposing nothing on senders.
Ah. If so, my reply is "if you want something done right, do it yourself." *All robust databases assign a unique ID to each record.* Why shouldn't a mailing list archive do so?
Right. Maybe that will encourage compliance. The complexity of catering to brokenness in this instance may be too high a price to impose on the all.
What complexity? Mailman just does
msg['X-List-Archive-Received-ID'] = Email.msgid()
(or however the message ID generator is spelled). After that, it's up to the archiver whether to do anything with it or not. I proposed a way that it could be used; if that's considered too complex, fine. But simply assigning one is not complex or otherwise very costly.