Question about message id

Derek Martin invalid at pizzashack.org
Tue Apr 9 14:53:41 UTC 2024


On Sun, Apr 07, 2024 at 01:19:09PM +0000, Ебрашка wrote:
> Question, what should I write in .muttrc to make my outgoing mails have
> the same beautiful message-ID as Yandex mail? 

The unfathomable thing about this question is why you (or anyone)
should care in the slightest what your message ID looks like.  It's an
esoteric detail about e-mail transfer, the specific contents of which
have no value to users, who in most cases won't even ever see the
message ID, since most mail clients hide that detail from you by
default.  You have no practical reason to care what it is as long as
everything is working correctly.  It's literally not for you--it's for
your MUA software.

From a practical standpoint, the only thing that matters is that the
generator intelligently makes a genuine effort to ensure the generated
message ID is unique (and perhaps that it does not needlessly leak
sensitive details about the user, though no message ID format that I'm
aware of--including Mutt's original default format--ever did that,
emphasis on "sensitive").  You should be able to trust your mail
client to handle that detail on your behalf.  If for some reason you
can't, you should be using different e-mail software.

Truthfully, Mutt typically shouldn't even be in the business of
generating message IDs, where the expectation is that it will hand the
mail off to the MTA running on the user's system, which should
handle message ID generation, so that there is no possibility of
overlap.  [In practice this is unlikely to be a problem, because the
format Mutt uses is different from the major mail transfer agents. 
The probability of an overlap is therefore exceedingly low, and thus
uniqueness is maintained.]

Other than that, as long as replies and message threading work
properly in your mail client, don't even look at it--it is (or should
be) completely opaque to you.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
-=-=-=-=-
This message is posted from an invalid address.  Replying to it will result in
undeliverable mail due to spam prevention.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.mutt.org/pipermail/mutt-users/attachments/20240409/f45b233a/attachment.asc>


More information about the Mutt-users mailing list