[Mailman-Developers] Improving the archives

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jeff Breidenbach writes:

 > > Notice that of 325146 total messages, 624 of them had no message-id
 > > header.  Even if you aggregate dup+col, you're still looking at a
 > > total duplicate rate of 0.29%.
 > 
 > Message ID's are supposed to be unique.

Fortunately, a rule more honored in the observance than the breach.
Nonetheless, it *is* breached.  The Postel Principle applies here, IMO.

 > better to go ahead and use the mesage-id, rather than concoct
 > yet another "this time we mean it!" unique identifier.

That's not the point.  We're not going to impose this on senders;
that's what Message-ID is for, as you say.  If a sender won't provide
a proper Message-ID, third parties who get a CC are just out of luck.

I simply think we should be prepared for applications where relying on
the sender to supply a UUID is not acceptable; we need to be able to
provide one ourselves.  Creating UUIDs is a solved problem, after all.
So we just specify a header to put it in, and subscribers will be able
to use it, per definition of a canonical URL.

Then we say that an archive SHOULD provide access to the resource via
Message-ID if available, and define how to construct that URL from the
List-Archive and Message-ID headers.

 > Which brings me to suggestion #2, which is go ahead and write
 > an RFC on how list servers should embed archival links in messages.

I think Barry already suggested that?  Anyway, +1.  But remember, a
standards-track RFC should have a working implementation to point to.