On Mar 30, 2012, at 02:18 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

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I suspect that there will be plenty of mailing lists that get fed messages from programs, e.g. think vcs -commit diff lists.  Those programs can also be buggy, but again I'd prefer that Mailman not compromise on this issue for their sake.

I predict you will eventually lose on this. That's not an argument for changing, of course. :-)

Possibly, but let's go down fighting. :)

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The point being that messages that flow through Mailman will have that hash in the message URLs in the Archived-At header and possibly in the decorated footers.  An archiver should certainly provide an interface to look up a message by pure Message-ID or the hash.  The hash is just a scheme to regularize the message id and is a tiny fraction more user-friendly (because of its limited alphabet and manageable, known-in-advance length).

I would say that's actually quite significant, because the trash that I've observed in message-ids is varied, to be polite. It will be nice to be able to avoid URL-escaping, RFC 2047 soft line breaks, and all the rest.

Exactly!

-Barry