[Mailman-Developers] From the creation of a ThreadID

[Richard Wackerbarth]

I would propose a slightly different scheme for converting messages to stable URIs..

If we create our ID by concatenation of some hash and a part of the date, then the mail server need remember only those messages that fall in the same date-sensitive part of the namespace. It can "forget" about ancient history.
Further, if we maintain sufficient Hamming distance, we can perform "error correction" (mapping multiple IDs to the same canonical one)) and, thus compensate for minor encoding differences caused by timing skew.


On Apr 8, 2012, at 12:38 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

> On Apr 05, 2012, at 05:29 PM, Terri Oda wrote:
> 
>> I haven't read the whole thread so maybe someone else has mentioned this, but
>> we may want to take advantage of the dynamic sublists code for this, since it
>> produces "conversations" or "topics" sublists and already has to generate and
>> maintain a code for each.  Rather than messageids these are meant to be a bit
>> more human-readable, so they're often words with numbers suffixed.  But yeah;
>> there exists code for Mailman 2.1 that might be reusable here, and there's a
>> GSoC project on the table to port to 3.0 so this might be a thing that we
>> could pass to the archive utility.
> 
> Don't forget too that we have the Stable URL proposal, which turns arbitrary
> Message-IDs into 32 upper-case ASCII letter and digit character base 32
> hashes.
> 
> -Barry