[Mailman-Developers] Google Summer of Code: Integration of Search Code

[Barry Warsaw]

(Aside: Is there some reason why you To: me and CC: the list rather than
having the list address in the To: field?  I ask because I'm wondering if it's
a gmail thing, or something about your MUA, and because I suppress the list
copy if I'm CC'd directly, I don't get a List-Post: header, so my MUA's
reply-to-list won't work on your messages.  I'm mostly curious because I can
work around it as you see here, but just wanted to point it out in case you
weren't aware of it and/or could easily fix it -- if you even agree it's
broken. ;)

On Mar 29, 2012, at 11:46 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:07 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:
>
>> Mailman 3 itself requires unique Message-IDs.
>
>So?  FWIW, I don't think I agree with that requirement (even RFC 5322
>doesn't make it a "MUST"), but I'm not going to argue with you about
>Mailman 3 design, that's your pidgin.

We had a fairly lengthy discussion about this a year or so ago, and I'm pretty
sure we came to the consensus (even if not unanimous) that it was reasonable
for Mailman to impose this restriction.  It's 2012 so if your MUA/MTA can't
generate unique message id's there's no reason for us to think you're not a
spammer <wink>.

>But there's nothing particularly Mailman-3-dependent about archiver web UIs,
>though.  I don't see any reason why the front end shouldn't be used on my
>several gigs of personal archives going back to about 1980, eg, or as a poor
>man's webmail.

True, the archiver as an independent component can be more lenient.  I'm just
pointing out that as fed from Mailman, it will only get unique message ids.
And if it doesn't, that's a bug in Mailman.

>> IIRC, the Mail Archive guys found a very very low collision rate over
>> millions of messages, and I think all such cases were basically spam.
>
>Sure, but XEmacs archives go back to at least 1994.  mailarchive.com
>is a more recent phenomenon.  In the early days of Linux/*BSD
>diffusion, there were lots of buggy MUAs/very simple MTAs out there.

Sure.  And 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.

>It doesn't do that for subobject content IDs, and more important,
>users don't necessarily have the X-Message-ID-Hash (they may have
>not-metoo set, they may have gotten the message as a direct Cc).
>True, it's easy enough to compute -- if you're a Mailman 3 developer
>and know it's present.<wink/>  And, of course, why have a Mailman 3
>dependency that is absolutely unnecessary?

Right.  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).

-Barry
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