[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

John A. Martin writes:

 > In the absence of a Message-ID
 > on an outgoing mail message many if not most MTAs will add one.  Why
 > not let Mailman anticipate the need to add a Message-ID when archiving
 > the message rather than leaving it to the outgoing MTA?

Quite.

My reason for saying "last resort" is simply that this is not
predictable to third parties.  Eg, I send you (a non-subscriber) a
message with CC and no Message-ID.  You'd like to find the thread in
the archives.  You may as well just do a linear search on that month's
threads.

An URL based on an MD5 of the message body in theory would work, but
in the presence of non-ASCII bodies, structured MIME, ML digests, and
various MTA autoconversions, that seems fragile.