Question about message id

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 01:13:52PM +1000, raf via Mutt-users wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 09, 2024 at 10:53:41AM -0400, Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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
[...]
> The link to a kernel mailing list message that was provided earlier
> in this discussion said that the choice to use base64 results in the
> possibility of / characters being included in the message id which
> causes problems for their archived messages accessible via a web
> browser.

Yeah, but...

> So it seems that there is a reason to care about this.

I disagree, both for the actual stated case of wanting "the same
beautiful message-ID as Yandex mail" and for the more general case of
controlling message ID format.  It's not something the USER should
ever have to think about, for the reasons I said, quoted above--it's
something only developers should ever have to care about, and even
then only to the point where it complies with standards, which it
does.  If Mutt wants to accommodate broken list archive software (it
IS broken, because it fails to handle the full range of decades-old
standard, documented valid input values), then it should use a format
that does that.  No user should ever have reason to care about this.
Seriously.

> Although one could argue that the mailing list archiving system
> should accept the responsibility of munging message ids to suit its
> own needs.

Indeed.  But even that presupposes the design flaw that leads to the
necessity of doing that.  They could have simply organized the data
differently (e.g. using a database, etc.) that does not have Unix path
name issues.  Also worth pointing out that if the software in question
runs on Windows, there are additional allowed characters that cause
breakage there.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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